The pioneering French cartoonist and animator Robert Lortac (1884-1973) founded his own company, Publi-Ciné – possibly also the first European animation studio – in Montrouge in 1919. The following year, he directed a series of commercials for the Citroën automobile company. Six of these are preserved at the CNC; however, this is the only film in the series to mix animation and live-action. It’s also the only one to propose a “feminist” image, as it portrays women at the wheel. Admittedly, it doesn’t convey a very positive image at the start, depicting a woman incapable of managing her own car as it stalls. Attempting to use the crank, she ends up hitting her fingers, and is forced to ask a passer-by for help. In the next take, however, we see an elegant woman confidently driving her Citroën. The car breaks down? No problem, she uses the crank, always smiling, cheerful, and wearing her high heels, and then drives off, since, as the final title says: “Woman’s most beautiful conquest is the Citroën.”
The film’s title refers to a much older text: “The horse, the noblest conquest that was ever made by man” is how Buffon began his Histoire Naturelle des animaux, celebrating man’s “docile” and “courageous” inseparable travelling companion in the mid-18th century. The phrase remained a popular saying in French, and was later applied to the bicycle, and finally the automobile.
Automobiles Citroën, created in 1919, adapted this saying for the cinematic promotion of their first car, the Citroën Type A. In addition to using the Eiffel Tower as an advertising sign and sponsoring expeditions around the globe, the company also quickly recognized the power of filmed commercials and the diversity of audiences exposed to them. Lortac’s series of Citroën commercials demonstrates this by addressing different target groups, both specifically and separately: men, couples, and women.
Like the Polish oven ad [Reklama Piecyków do Piecznia], La Plus Belle Conquête de la Femme presents its product, the car, as a vehicle for the modern woman, allowing her to travel freely and conquer the roads on her own. The creators of this ad thus acknowledged that female consumers of the early 1920s were a potential customer not only of beauty products, fashion, or household items, but also cars – provided they were easily controlled and didn’t need complicated mechanical work, which women were generally represented as incapable of mastering.

Dominique Moustacchi, Noemi Daugaard, Virginia Bonilla Durán