Mille Pompons! Fantômette, the Famous and Unknown Schoolgirl Superhero of France

Introduction

North American girls who grow up reading English-language literature have a number of adventurous young heroines to admire and emulate: Jo March from Little Women, Anne Shirley from Anne of Green Gables, Nancy Drew from the Nancy Drew Mystery Stories, Hermione Granger from the Harry Potter series, Katniss from The Hunger Games, as well as Wonder Woman, Batgirl, and many others. These literary girls and women are bright, talented, and push the envelope of socially acceptable behaviour. They have careers, solve crimes, do magic, and live as full a life as their male literary counterparts. Girls who grow up reading French-language literature do not have as many models to choose from, and many of those are translations from English-language literature. One fictional character, however, is well known in France and is as bright and talented as the many English-language literary girls and women. Her name is Françoise Dupont, alias Fantômette, and she is virtually unknown in the English-speaking world. She could be described as a hybrid between Nancy Drew and Batgirl, only younger than either of these characters. Penny Brown, in A Critical History of French Children’s Literature, states that “just as comic strips have their superheroes, the star of the modern adventure novel for young readers has to be Fantômette, the schoolgirl supersleuth and righter of wrongs” (276). Olivier Piffault, Thomas Clerc, and Christine Leroy all refer to Fantômette as the first French female superhero.

Fantômette visits exotic places; she crosses the desert, goes beneath the seas, and ventures into space. She flies planes, drives cars, skis, canoes, rides horses and camels, parachutes, speaks several languages and reads lips, knows martial arts, and has skills unusual for a girl her age, or for any one person, to possess. She always prevails over villains, including her primary nemesis, Le Masque d’Argent. She is sometimes in danger, but she never really gets hurt. While she has a safe home to go to and a cat to pet, there are no pesky parents to ruin all her fun. She can go off to search for treasure or tie up criminals and still has time to do her homework. She has no concerns about money or basic necessities. Who would not want to read about Fantômette?

She initially appeared in novels, followed by a live-action television series, an animated television series, and graphic novels. The books have been translated into several languages, including Spanish, Hebrew, Chinese, Turkish, and Indonesian, but never into English. According to WorldCat, a primarily English-language bibliographic database, very few libraries in the United States or Canada own copies of the Fantômette books. There does not appear to be any previously published scholarly articles focusing on Fantômette in English. It is a mystery how this crime fighting student has escaped the English-language audience.

In this resource, I first present an overview of the character of Fantômette, her creator, and her origins. I also discuss the character’s popularity in some Francophone cultures and explore potential explanation as to why the Fantômette’s books were translated into some languages, but not English.

Who is Fantômette?

George Chaulet (1931–2012) created Fantômette and wrote all of the novels. The character’s name roughly translates into English as “Little Ghost.” This could refer to her ability to sneak up on people or her habit of catching criminals and then disappearing, leaving them tied up with a note for the police, signed with an “F,” similar to Zorro’s signature “Z.” The first book in Chaulet’s series, Les Exploits de Fantômette, was published in 1961 as part of the collection Bibliothèque Rose, from Hachette, a French publisher. Fantômette has brown hair and brown eyes. Chaulet provided only a vague description of her costume, specifying only that she wore a mask and a black cape, closed with a golden clip shaped like an “F”: “une jeune fille masquée, avec une cape noire fermée par une agrafe d...