Features

When the head of the French CBI decided to address an international summit in English a few weeks back, because "It's the language of business," the French President and foreign minister flounced out.

No other country on earth fights harder to keep its own language pure of creeping Anglicisation. So much of their pop music is hopeless - it gets such a helping hand from local radio that it's sheltered from the bracing wind of competition.

By the same token, when something genuinely good like Air or Daft Punk comes bursting out of France, it has a fresh, exotic aroma about it because it wasn't cultured in quite the same soil as our Anglo-American stuff. Neither does the C6 come out of the same homogenised German fertiliser that nurtures all the designs that form its leading opposition.

When it comes to the French combining their staunchly-defended isolationism with something they feel truly confident about, the results can prove spectacular. Think the top end of the food game, or the rag trade, where they have such a dominant position; they've even got the total freehold on the language: haute cuisine, haute couture and so on.

From Escof.er to Chanel, they laid the ground rules, all of which makes them feel that when it comes to luxury goods, they need genuflect to no other nation. The C6 is one such luxury item and, regardless of whether Citroen actually has the technical competence to carry it off, that same train of thought informs it.

And the C6 is grand, because the French love a grand gesture. Grand and modern. Though they respect history, they see no need to replicate it. The Grands Projets, the chunks of modern architecture parachuted into the Parisian street plan during the Mitterrand years, were entirely in the spirit of Versailles or Napoleon's Paris street plan, or come to that the Boulevard Périphérique or all those nuclear power stations.

Pre- or post-democracy, when French powers have wanted something done, they've got on and done it. No mealy mouthed skirting around local opposition gets in the way. 'If you want to drain the swamp, don't ask the opinion of the frogs,' as a French planning official once said.

And those buildings' design is modern too. You get none of that Prince Charles-style 'in keeping' architecture; building knock-offs of the old stuff because we've got no confidence in the new - in other words, the same thinking that gave us the Jaguar S-Type. The French knew it wasn't right to ape the Louvre, so they installed a glass pyramid in front of it to compare and contrast instead.

So we have a car that's quite unlike the international opposition and one that's definitely a grand gesture. The game is modern luxury. Huge space, big soft chairs, all four of them electrically reclining. Some lovely touches too.