France and Bande Dessinées

Becassine Album

When the anime adaptation of Radiant was announced it was quite a novel and perhaps surprising piece of news for many anime fans. It was not the first time a French work was adapted into anime, french and many foreign works were animated by Japanese studios in the 70s and 80s.

France has a close history with comics that came to be accepted as a form of popular storytelling but also valued as a piece of literature. In order to see how this happened we have to start with the rise of bande dessinees comics in France and Belgium.

The origins of bandes dessinees in France came in the form of journals that included illustrated strips often with speech or commentary underneath for the reader to follow along with the illustrations. For instance, a journal that published stories was La Semaine de Suzette, it was aimed primarily at young upper-class girls and its pages were filled with cooking recipes, agony aunt crosswords and cut outs for dolls clothes and most importantly for us bande dessinees or BD for short. Suzette would give birth most notably to Becassine, a Bds that follows a young Breton housemaid's daily life. It is a character that found significant success and it is still widely recognized today, the series itself was presented like I described above without the perennial speech bubble.

Picture of BD featured in La Semaine de Suzette   

At around the time a publication called L'Epatant emerged, however, unlike Suzette it was aimed at young and the not so young. L'Epatant was where the Les Pieds Nickeles, a BD that followed a trio of anarchists that are also indolent crooks and slackers first emerged... The trio was iconic and Nickeles is renowned as one of the longest running comic series in the world. Behind this work was Louis Forton who is called a pioneer of BDs due to the path he paved for future cartoonists that would continue Les Pieds Nickeles and his other work renowned work Bibi Fricotin after his death.

Picture of Journal Les Belles Images

La Semaine de Suzette, L'Epatant were not the only publications that published Bds around. There were others in this period pre first world war like Le Rites and Les Belles Images. Some were more focused on bds and stories than others but they did all feature Bds in every weekly release, and that provided a distribution method for other journals in the future to copy.

Page of an Issue of L'Epatant

Daily publications would more actively take up dbs in the post war period and include them in their weekly supplement issues, and these issues usually marketed at younger audiences provided many notable series. The first series to take note of in this period was Zig et Puce, a series that appeared in the Le Dimanche Illustre that featured the adventure of two young boys, Zig and Puce who were accompanied by Alfred, a penguin in their travels around the globe. The series by Alain Saint Ogan was one of the first ones to actually start using speech bubbles that whilst widely used in the United States was used only sparingly by a few authors, Alain Saint Ogan being one of them. Zig et Puce would not find the same sort of success as the previous title I have spoken about so far, but it did serve as an influence to one of the most iconic BDs ever, The adventures of TinTin according to its author Herge.

 

Series like Zig et Puce and Tin Tin both were born out of a growing period for Bds in France. Daily newspaper publications had started to feature Bds in their weekly youth supplement publication. One thing to keep in mind is that these bds naturally were fit to appeal to the demographic of readers of the publication. For instance, Le Petit Vingtieme, was the supplement of Le Vingtieme Siecle a catholic ring-wing newspaper from Brussel, Tin Tin in the Land of Soviets was a product made to appeal to youth within the Christian and capitalist demographic. These weekly supplements aimed at young people were increasingly seeing their sales being driven by the illustrated stories, and publication came to include more of them over time.

However, a tsunami arrived in the third with the arrival of Le Journal de Mickey in France in 1934. Paul Winkler purchased the rights to many strips from the United States amongst which the flagship title was the ones from Walt Disney. Mickey was published in this new journal as its main flagship strip along other imported strips, all together the comic strips made up four out of eight pages of the publication. The other pages featured a french serialized novel, reply to letters, jokes and the result of regular competitions in which readers could win small prizes.

A page of Le Journal de Mickey   

Le Journal de Mickey was significant because it showcased a different style of strip from the bds prominent in France that could be described as histoires en images. The textual context that was needed for most Bds, was part of the strip with the use of speech bubbles which alongside the colour and greater art detail added a kind of exoticism around the strips. After all, many of the strips in France at the time relied on small text outside the image but were monochrome and overall drawn with less detail. Mickey was received incredibly well, the format of the publication helped a lot with the interactions with the public that made it be accepted despite its initial exoticism.

The success of the publication by Hickler, especially Journal de Mickey, naturally shook the entire landscape of bds in France. Old publications found themselves having to change as they lost readers, and Mickey's success became enviable as it reached over four hundred thousand copies sold per issue, a number that was unmatched across the whole of Europe that started to publish strips of Mickey as well by a long margin.

However, the late 30s would be a little surprising for France, the invasion of Poland by Germany meant France declared war and attacked Germany. A large part of France would be occupied by the Nazi regime and they set up a regime in Vichy. During this period many Bd publications were disrupted not only because of the drastic change in government and state control over media that some companies rejected but also because of a shortage of paper. Publications of bds continued at first but shortages of paper meant it had to rationed and the government would allocate it to publications whose content it favoured. For instance Journal de Mickey moved to the south the non occupied zone as Paul Winkler was jewish. However, whilst some publications struggled some actually excelled during this period, one notable one was Le Temeraire.

The cover for an issue of Le Temeraire

Le Temeraire is perhaps not as widely known now but it was a publication similar to the sort of type of Mickey that had become a standard. It featured many with anti-Semitic elements imbued in the stories of the bds featured in issues. Whatever one might think of Le Temeraire was a popular publication, its sales reached over two hundred thousand per issue, and to a large extent it was because of the quality of the works published. It took all the elements of Journal de Mickey but added to it with themed issues that gave it a large blend of styles and stories. Overall whilst controversial and short in duration Le Temeraire  it ceased publication in 1944 it did have an impact in the growth of Bds in France. 

Another contribution that Le Temeraire left was the fact it was a mostly French publication, and that would spark debates in post world war 2 that were already ongoing debates in pre-war. The popularity of Bds had caused debates about their possible influence on children,  the introduction of Mickey and other American comic strips in France during the 30s only further sparked such debates because it gave rise to fears that it would drift youth away from national culture. In Europe in general fears of Americanization were prominent and states tried to fight back against it pre world war. In post world war those debates continued and in France that had a strong cultural nationalism and left wing groups and catholic  forces joined together for a restriction in American comics. It was not just a protectionism measure however, conservatives forces pushed for restriction when it came to sexual and content with excessive violence.  

The budding industry of Bds publication did not drop dead as a result of that. A large part of this was because Le Temeraire had provided the answer due to its singular focus on only using French works. Journals in the format style of Le Temeraire emerged post world war and quickly adapted themselves to the new laws. Works like Les Pionniers De L'Esperance, Guerre a la Terre both sci-fi stories and others emerged in this period and they took the lessons of the successful publication that came before by blending in various styles of comics and including various elements like jokes, quizzes and prizes in every issue. 

Les Pionneiers de L'Esperance

In a stroke of coincidence, the bd journal that became the most popular in the 50s onwards was 'Vaillant' that managed to reach over two hundred thousand copies sold per issue. Vaillant was linked to the L'Humanite, a daily news and it and Vaillant were sponsored by the French Communist Party. The previously mentioned Les Pionniers de L'Esperance was published in Vaillant but the most notable series published in it was Pif le Chien. Pif followed the adventures of a dog and various other animals, the left wing leaning aspect of the series would be shown often by problems caused by selfish and harmful actions taken by  groups of animals, with the solutions needing the cooperation of everyone.  The iconic nature of Pif as character in the publication meant Vaillant would eventually change its name to Pif-gadget in the 60s which highlighted the special status of the series. 

There were many other publications like Coeurs Vaillant, which funnily enough was a right wing catholic publication despite the similarity in name to Vaillant. Other publications like Le Journal De Mickey managed to restart in France and Spirou the home of Tin Tin, and series like Lucky Luke from Belgium also flowed into France in the 50s. 

Cover of an issue of Couers Vaillants

In the late 50s, a new publication would emerge that became one of the biggest sources of bds in the 60s and 70s. That publication was called Pilote, it was formed by various veteran artists that joined together to create a new journal. One of the first bds that stood out from the new publication was Tanguy et Laverdure, a story about two pilots for the French Air Forces and their adventures.  It was followed tith Barba Rouge and Not much later it would give birth to classics such as Asterix, all popular titles that have left a lasting print in France's Ninth Art the BDs.

Cover of Pilote featuring Tanguy

Returning to the law of 1949 that restricted content depicted in publications, gradually over the years this censorship over bds declined. In the 1960s, bds like Barbarella that depicted the heroine well satirical series often leaned in content of sexual nature. Naturally, that led to more varied and Bds that could be aimed at an young adult demographic which Pilote was already trying to court with the works it published.

However, whilst bds were on the rise the 70s came knocking and it brought with it big economic problems for the world at large. The reasons for the crisis that would eventually lead to a new orthodoxy in the economy is nothing that is relevant to our discussions but let's just say it involved oil and inflation.

Economic woes hit home and entertainment as an industry suffered. When it came to Bds, the biggest crisis was the one faced by publications, which had to shift from weeklies as it was no longer viable. Pilote and others shifted to monthly but even that was not enough, and many publications went under in the 70s and 80s. That did not spell the doom of Bds though, publication of albums that were made up of many compiled chapters of a bd in one book started to rise.

Bande Desinees seemed to no longer need to be published in weekly journals anymore. Bds had garnered an established audience that continued to want to read Bds despite the fall of the weekly journals. This continued into the 90s with growth of album publication increasing significantly over time. In part this was driven also by the left wing government, culture minister Jack Lang that built on the protectionist side of 1949 laws by building bodies to help in the material side of publishing Bds. This was a result of a greater recognition of Bds as a medium of the arts, it officially became the Ninth Art and a cultural element of France to be protected.

The results of these measures have shown themselves to be great. Publication of albums have spiked from the 400s in the early 80s to over 4000s in the 2000s. Bds continue to grow and the space they have gained in libraries and bookstores, but also university courses for striving artists and festivals and museums on Bds have solidified itself as a cultural marker in France.

Images taken from BNF Galica - Linked below

https://gallica.bnf.fr/accueil/en/content/accueil-en?mode=desktop