Drawing France: French Comics and the Republic (review)

This study underlines the influential and decisive role of bandes dessinées (BD) in the politics and culture of France, especially during periods of political crisis and at moments of cultural and political evolution over the last two centuries. Joel Vessels states at the outset that the ‘subject of the work is not simply the place of BDs in French society but the eternal construction of Frenchness itself ’ (p. 14, emphasis original), and he takes his reader through several key moments in the development of the genre. He shows that it was during Napoleon’s time that pictographs first became an official voice, their production being used ‘as a potent form of political culture developed right alongside the French Republic’ (p. 19). However, this was to have perverse consequences: ironically, posters and illustrations became so popular that they were declared more dangerous than the written word and they had to be legally regulated. In the twentieth century, with the decline of BDs for adults and the significant increase in those for children, the BD became a mass medium; and with the enormous number of weekly publications came renewed concerns that the genre might exercise a subversive and dangerous influence on French society. During the Second World War and the Fourth and Fifth Republics, the BD was given the role of valorizing what was identified as authentically French: its function ‘came to be an articulation of “French-ness”’ (p. 106). But, as Vessels explains, this was also the time when the first American comics appeared, threatening to contaminate French youth and the future of the country. Once again, heavy legislation was introduced in order to protect children from the negative cultural influences of Americanization. By the end of the last century, BD had become an authentically French cultural product and had gained full status as an art form. According to Vessels, the objective was to show to the world a single but multifaceted French culture, and BD was the embodiment of this principle. To a certain extent, this clearly and carefully written work is built on Bourdieu’s principle that ‘when speaking of cultural products one should always realize they talk also of politics’ (p. 9). Vessels has examined how BDs have been purposefully used for political and cultural aims, especially at historical moments ‘when concerns for the stability of the French state and the definition of what it meant to be truly French was most pointed’ (p. 14). In so doing, he effectively demonstrates that BD was both recognized and used by the state as a tool of cultural policy.