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Citroën and Renault were in the 1950s in the business of curves, so little wonder their engineers were trying to find systematic ways to represent them. In 1955, Citroën launched the model DS, famed for its aerodynamic curves, manufacturing 1,455,746 instances before ceasing production in 1975.

Semiotician and cultural critic Roland Barthes announced the DS in these terms:

The new Citroën manifestly falls from heaven insofar as it presents itself first of all as a superlative object … The DS (the Déesse, or goddess) has all the characteristics … of one of those objects from another world … We know that smoothness is always an attribute of perfection … Christ’s tunic was seamless, just as the spaceships of science fiction are of unbroken metal … The DS has the beginnings of a new phenomenology of assembly, as if we were leaving the world of welded elements for a world of juxtaposed elements held together by the sole virtue of their marvelous shape … Everything indicates a sort of control exerted over movement …

In the exhibition halls, the sample cars are visited with an intense, affectionate care: this is the great tactile experience of discovery, the moment when the visual marvelous will submit to the reasoned assault of touching (for touch is the most demystifying of the senses …) … sheet metal stroked … doors caressed … Here the object is totally prostituted …

[T]he Déesse is mediatized in fifteen minutes, accomplishing in this exorcism the entire dumb show of petit bourgeois annexation.¹⁵⁸

Multimodally across image, object, and space – and viscerally – the Citroën DS represented the merger of object and movement. Functionally speaking, the dynamic movement of line and surface were captured in Bézier curves, the invitation to travel in the sleekly lined object – layers of action-in-entity and entity-in-action.

Barthes was killed in a moment of automotive movement, hit by a laundry truck as he crossed the road on the way home from a lunch with François Mitterrand, future President of France – such was the fame he had acquired for his cultural prognostications. Was the truck a Citroën?

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¹⁵⁷ Gerald Farin, 2002, “A History of Curves and Surfaces in Cagd,” pp. 1–21 in Handbook of Computer Aided Geometric Design, edited by G. Farin, J. Hoschek, and M.-S. Kim, Amsterdam, NL: Elsevier, pp. 5–6; Mike Kamermans, 2011–2017, “A Primer on Bézier Curves,” retrieved from https://pomax.github.io/bezierinfo/

¹⁵⁸ Roland Barthes, 1957 [2012], Mythologies, New York, NY: Hill and Wang, pp. 169–71.

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 132-134. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

Citroën DS and Bézier Curves §MS1.2.2d