I have been waiting for it (You think it’ll be electric???)!!!

In 1957, Roland Barthes wrote about “The New Citroën Stranger Than Fiction trailer Moscow Chill dvd ” (Excerpt p. 88):

I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.

It is obvious that the new Citroën has fallen from the sky inasmuch as it appears at first sight as a superlative object. We must not forget that an object is the best messenger of a world above that of nature: one can easily see in an object at once a perfection and an absence of origin, a closure and a brilliance, a transformation of life into matter (matter is much more magical than life), and in a world a silence which belongs to the realm of fairy-tales. The D.S. – the ‘Goddess’ – has all the features (or at least the public is unanimous in attributing them to it at first sight) of one of those objects from another universe which have supplied fuel for the neomania of the eighteenth century and that of our own science-fiction: the Déesse is first and foremost a new Nautilus.

This is why it excites interest less by its substance than by the junction of its components. It is well known that smoothness is always an attribute of perfection because its opposite reveals a technically and typically human operation of assembling: Christ’s robe was seamless, just as the airships of science-fiction are made of unbroken metal.

Roland Barthes Dragonquest , “The New Citroën” in Mythologies (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972); pp. 88-90.

Apparently, February 7 “dans le cadre du salon Rétromobile, à la porte de Versailles, à Paris, se déroulera la vente de la DS21 Prestige, spécialement conçue pour l’animateur de radio-télévision Philippe Bouvard, baptisée “voiture-bureau” (LeMonde.fr)” … The DS21 baptized the “car-office” conceived specially for the TV presenter P. Bouvard is going to be sold…

Here is an image found on the website of the Citroën museum of Vincent Crescia, located in the canton of Neuchâtel (Suisse):

Intérieur de la DS 21 Prestige carburateur 1971, ex Philippe Bouvard.