Lhe post-Second World War period corresponded, in France and elsewhere in the liberal West, to a phase of widespread accession to the use and ownership of the automobile object – utility vehicles, agricultural vehicles and heavy goods vehicles included. During this golden age, the program enacted in the first issue of The Argus of automobiles and locomotions, a reference journal for the motoring community founded in 1927, seemed to be coming to fruition. The programmatic editorial indeed proclaimed that “the automobile tends to become as necessary as the wheat and bread it transports”.
Foreign nowhere, the automobile adapted to all roads worthy of the name, which dedicated engineering departments undertook to standardize and adapt. There followed a widespread domestication of space through the adoption of standard surfaces and the first signs and road equipment.
Soon, special pavements, called “motorways” – the highway Italian roads were the first during the 1920s, while in France the southern motorway, starting from Paris, was inaugurated on April 12, 1960 – and urban public spaces reconfigured around the new speed of motorized vehicles made their mark. appearance.
There was therefore in the car, and until recently, much more than the car. Beyond the massive possibility of individual mobility, there was a marker of the general degree of advancement of a nation, which Jules Romains (1885-1972) had summarized in a work with an evocative title, The Automobile of France (1951). The France of the “glorious thirty” played part of its growth and its regained pride, even to its happiness too perhaps, immortalized by the humanist photography of Robert Doisneau (1912-1994) with picnics in 4 CV Renault.
Way of life
This time was above all rich in hopes: with the taking of the wheel of French society – but this very inclusive phenomenon was entirely Western – the entry into an era of increasingly shared progress took place. Like the United States, the country was then built as an “automotive republic”, inclusive for certain sections of the population wishing to emancipate – from ethnic minorities to women, now just as drivers as men. In the growth of these extensive concentric circles lies the explanation for the increasing success of the self. What a few elites had undertaken to cultivate initially as a fashion had effectively become a mode of transport and then a way of life, gradually accessible to a larger part of the population.
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