World War I in Bande Dessinée: La Semaine de Suzette and the Birth of a Breton Heroine at War!

Abstract

Bandes dessinées (literally drawn strips) are comics coreated for French and Belgian audiences. Also referred to as BDs, they target various generations of readers and they address a broad spectrum of themes. In 1904, a new generation of newspapers targeted to the youth, la presse à un sou, revolutionized the history of both children’s literature and BD, thereby binding them together to give birth to a new art form: “le 9ème Art” (the 9th Art). Since the last decade, emerging scholarship has pointed to the value of this graphic medium as a reliable source for cultural studies.¹ The recent study of BD since the 1980s led historians such as the French Marion Pignot to analyze the value of illustrés de jeunesse in the context of World War I (WWI).² In her article “Suzette contre Fillette,” Pignot claims that leisure literature is crucial to promote “wartime culture geared at children” (“la culture de guerre à destination des enfants”).³ When assessing the production of wartime children’s illustrés, we are faced with two concurring dimensions: the social and political context they were conceptualized on the one hand, and the targeted readers on the other. Some of these weeklies, such as La Semaine de Suzette, continued to exist decades after the war and acquired the status of highly canonical children’s literature.⁴