Four men dressed in skin-tight hooded jumpsuits – one black, one blue, one green and one red – are waiting, some sitting down, others doing handstands, in what looks like a space-age white pod. No-one says anything; the atmosphere is tense. Suddenly, an alarm sounds and the black-clad and the blue-clad men rush forwards, aiming for a small aperture in the far wall of the pod. What is going on? Who are these men and what are they competing for? The answer lies in the last sequence, where the scene shifts to a classroom: a young girl sits at her desk holding a four-colour ballpoint pen and pushing down the pen’s blue and black buttons at the same time.

This film – a 2013 advert for the Bic 4-Colour ballpoint pen – pays tribute to a sketch in Woody Allen’s 1972 comedy Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid To Ask), in which Allen and other men, clad in paratrooper white jumpsuits and waiting in a NASA-like mission control centre, represent anxious sperm about to be launched into the great unknown. But it is also significant that the product advertised, a pen first launched in 1970, had by the 2010s become so familiar and ubiquitous that an anthropomorphic representation of its functionality would be intelligible to all.

Although it is sold and used all over the world, one distinctive aspect of the four-colour ballpoint’s identity is that it was – and still is – Made in France. In 1957 the French critic Roland Barthes published a collection of essays entitled Mythologies, in which he examined the cultural significance of various French objects that he called ‘myths’, ranging from washing powder to steak-frites and the Citroën DS 19. When, in a spirit of Barthesian enquiry, I began to search for examples of quintessential French objects and cultural practices for Garlic & Pearls, a podcast in which my British co-host and I compare and contrast aspects of French and British culture, the 4-Colour pen was one of the first examples that came to my mind. For not only is the aerodynamic pen an example of an enduringly successful practical design; it is also a French ‘myth’, a cultural object loaded with meaning.  It is, in the words of my co-host Suzanne Raine, ‘a stealth bomber of Frenchness’.

What is the history of this remarkable pen? Although it was produced by a team of designers and engineers, the innovative multicolour ballpoint was the inspiration of one man, design pioneer and industrialist Marcel Bich, who gave to Bic, the brand he created, a simplified version of his name. Born in Turin in 1914, Baron Bich (a title granted in 1841 to his great-grandfather by King Charles-Albert of Sardinia) came from a line of civil engineers. He grew up in France, where after taking a law degree he began a career in industry, first gaining experience in the manufacturing of ink.

In 1945, with fellow ink technician Edouard Buffard, Bich set up his first company, manufacturing parts for fountain pens, and then, in an inspired move, acquired the patent of the ballpoint pen invented by Hungarian designer László Biró. Bich believed he could improve Biró’s design and in 1950, he and Buffard launched their first revolutionary product, the Bic Cristal. It is an exceptionally reliable and still widely used ballpoint pen, with a transparent plastic body of hexagonal shape, reminiscent of a pencil, which made it possible to monitor ink levels. Modern, affordable and – a desirable quality in those early days of plastic use – disposable, the Cristal’s success made Bic the global leader in ballpoint pens. More innovations (and more plastic) followed: a disposable lighter with adjustable flame and later a disposable razor.

When it was released in 1970, the 4-Colour retractable Bic ballpoint had behind it the impressive track record and innovative heft of the brand. Besides, the 4-Colour pen was not only a pen, but also a pleasing novelty object: a small handheld machine for changing colours. Precise springs allow the desired colour to be selected mechanically by retracting or extending a tip. The body of the pen is made of highly resilient plastics that can withstand thousands of these push-button activations. The highly viscous quality of the ink makes it possible for each 4-Colour pen to write 8 kms of lines – or 2 kms per individual colour. Over time, thankfully, the colour cartridges have also become refillable.

Part of the 4-Colour pen’s allure also has to do with the closely protected secrecy of its manufacturing process and the brand’s forbidding NASA-like industrial identity. The factory in Montsévrain, where the pens are still made, embodies this sense of mystery. Situated only a few kilometres from the Disneyland theme park outside Paris, it is a French design citadel that guards itself steadfastly against industrial espionage. What is known is that the company acquired high-precision machines from the Swiss watchmaking industry to produce its pens, and that all components – the plastic casings, the silicon stem cartridges, the tungsten carbide balls of the ballpoints, the inks – are made in-house. Quality control is known to be strict. But neither the composition of the inks, nor the workings and assembling of the internal mechanism, nor indeed the precise way in which the tiny ball (the size of a grain of sand) is fitted into the pen’s points, have ever been disclosed.

An important aspect of what makes the 4-Colour ballpoint a Barthesian ‘myth’ of Frenchness is that from its creation in 1970, the pen has encapsulated a certain idea of what might be termed Francofuturism: an optimistic belief in French engineering, innovation and modernity, which was also reflected in interior design and fashion. The year 1975 saw the launch of the supersonic airliner Concorde, a joint project of the French company Sud Aviation (later Aérospatiale) and of the British Aircraft Corporation. During the same decade, the ultra-modern Roissy-Charles de Gaulle airport was inaugurated and the prototypes of TGV trains and of the Ariane expendable launch systems were manufactured and approved.

To use the pen, this ‘myth’ of Frenchness, is to connect with French self-belief and love of modernity. And this is balanced out by another aspect of the 4-Colour ballpoint, at once structural and nostalgic, which also provides the punchline in the 2013 advert: its close association with French schooling. For 50 continuous years, French schoolchildren have all carried the 4-Colour pen in their pencil case.

One of Baron Bich’s buccaneering breakthroughs was to get his ballpoint pens into French classrooms in the face of strong opposition from educators, who supported the use of traditional fountain pens. This he achieved in 1965 by arranging to print attractive advertisements for his ballpoint pens onto the complimentary blotters tucked into French children’s regulation lined notebooks. This stealth campaign led to lobbying from enthusiastic parents, and from September 1965 French schoolchildren were allowed to write with ballpoint pens.

Five years later, the 4-Colour Bic would find its natural home in French schools as the ideal tool for a mainstay of French education: grammatical analysis. The pen’s four different colours make it easy for pupils to parcel out a sentence into verb, subject and direct or indirect object, and to indicate conjunctions, pronouns, clauses and subclauses. It is with the 1970 French design classic in their hand that French children learn to parse their own language. The clicking 4-Colour pen is no less resonant a Barthesian ‘myth’, no less pregnant a symbol of the French Republic, than the tricolour and the Marseillaise.