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French Literature

Literature

Bande dessinée: a very popular literary genre in France!

If you talk to French adults, many will recount early trips to the public library, often before they even knew how to read, just to sit in a corner and turn pages of their favorite bande dessinée.

 

Bandes dessinées are French graphic novels. They are slightly bigger than a regular piece of paper, showcase four strips on each page, with each strip divided in boxes of uneven length. The story is told through characters talking to each other thanks to bulles, and each album tells a complex story with its own ending. Different bandes dessinées target different audiences, and some are for children (Boule et Bill, Cédric, Léonard), others for teenagers (Agrippine, Louca, Une aventure épatante de Jules), and others yet for adults (Persépolis, Les passagers du vent, Blake et Mortimer, Maus). Some of them can be read by all, even though each age group will understand something different (Tintin, Lucky Luke, Astérix et Obélix).

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Academics are not all in full agreement as to the history of the bande dessinée. For some, bandes dessinées always existed especially if you consider that it is simply a continuous story in images. According to those, cavemen paintings in the grottes de Lascaux or even the tapisserie de Bayeux recounting the conquest of England by the Duke of Normandy in 1066 could qualify. Nevertheless, it is around the XIXth century and the explosion of popular weeklies and bi-weeklies that the genre really found an audience. The images d’Epinal (popular images that

show a naive and oversimplified vision of known events) also influenced the genre. Many of the authors who become popular in the XXth century are from francophone Belgium: Hergé with Tintin, Peyo with Les Schtroumpfs, Morris with Lucky Luke or even Franquin with Gaston. More recently, bandes dessinées authors from francophone Africa became really popular: Marguerite

Abouet with Aya de Yopougon, Kabs with Car Rapid or even Odia with Ass et Oussou).

 

Since 1974, the city of Angoulême in France organizes every January a Festival de la bande dessinée. In January 2025, it will celebrate its 52nd edition. It is the most important meeting for bande dessinée authors and publishers, and is a wonderful event to read new and old works, meet authors, and see what is being done in the world in terms of this genre. Take a look at the following websites for information on this genre.

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