{"id":5021,"date":"2013-03-07T14:18:59","date_gmt":"2013-03-07T20:18:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=5021"},"modified":"2013-03-07T14:18:59","modified_gmt":"2013-03-07T20:18:59","slug":"the-end-of-french-cars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=5021","title":{"rendered":"The End of French Cars"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><A href=\"http:\/\/www.stephenbayley.com\/w\/the-end-of-the-french-car\">Stephen Bayley<\/a>: <\/p>\n<blockquote><p><i>When I started travelling alone, French cars were enthralling. They were quirky-looking with ingenious technology.  And they had an attachment to motor-sport. Eighteen years old, hitch-hiking back from Florence, I got stuck in a field near Strasbourg.  Sitting in the sun dopily looking at rolling green Alsatian hills for most of a day, I saw and will never forget a Renault R8 Gordini driven hard on a lonely road, punctuating my boredom.  All crackling exhaust, French racing bleu with two longitudinal white stripes and hilarious negative camber rear suspension.<\/p>\n<p>Later on that same trip I eventually arrived in Paris. Being intellectually ambitious, I had my pockets stuffed with Livre de Poche editions of Sartre and I went, my rucksack and I,  straight to the vast Renault and Citroen showrooms on the Champs-Elysee to confirm my feelings about the superiority of French culture.  The showrooms seemed intoxicatingly sophisticated, places of worship for a more advanced civilization.  Does anybody now remember the Renault Fuego ?  I saw one spot-lit on a plinth in the first arrondissement of Paris.  It was bright green, like a tree frog.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Stephen Bayley: When I started travelling alone, French cars were enthralling. They were quirky-looking with ingenious technology. And they had an attachment to motor-sport. Eighteen years old, hitch-hiking back from Florence, I got stuck in a field near Strasbourg. Sitting in the sun dopily looking at rolling green Alsatian hills for most of a day, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5021"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5021"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5021\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5021"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5021"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5021"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}