Family History and Social History: Étienne Davodeau's Reportage of Reality in Les Mauvaises gens

Abstract

Abstract This article discusses a bande dessinee that recounts the life story of the artist's parents, factory workers in a deeply conservative milieu who became trade union militants. The article is split into four sections. The first deals with techniques that reinforce the effect of documentary accuracy; the second examines how page layout adds symbolic effects and varies pace and perspective; the third analyses the complex chronology, in which there is not only a shifting between the time of narration and the time of the events recounted, but a further significant temporal displacement relating to the process of narration; the fourth considers the extent to which this biography is also necessarily autobiographical. Winner of the 2005 Grand Prix de la Critique, the 2006 prize for best story at the Angouleme International Comics Festival, the 2006 Prix du Public (voted by newspaper readers), and the Prix France Info (voted by journalists, for comics that engage with topical subject matter), Etienne Davodeau's Les Mauvaises gens ['Unpleasant, Unsociable People'] defies easy classification.1 In the author's own words, the book is a bande dessinee about the universal and timeless struggle of the human race, revealed through the portrait of real people from a specific region of France in the post-Second World War era. Mon intention etait surtout de raconter une histoire vraie en bande dessinee en partant de ce principe: la vie quotidienne est constituee par essence d'histoires a raconter. [...] je me suis apercu que toutes ces luttes, dans cette region en particulier, [...] sont locales, bien sur, mais elles parlent d'individus qui, collectivement, essaient d'echapper a une condition qu'on leur impose. En cela, elles sont universelles et intemporelles. ['My main goal was to tell a true story in comics format, based on the principle that life is made up of stories to tell. [...] I realised that all of these struggles, in this region in particular, [...] are local, of course, but they are about individuals who try collectively to escape from a condition imposed on them. Thus, these struggles are universal and timeless.']2 The book has the format and layout characteristic of a graphic novel, it is typically classified as a documentary, and the subject is indirectly autobiographical - all points to which we return below. The region in question is Les Mauges, near Angers, and it is where Etienne Davodeau's parents, Maurice and Marie-Jo, were born and where they still live today. What is recounted is the parents' life story. It is recounted in the context of a conservative and Catholic milieu transformed by post-war industrialisation into a region of militant unionism. Les Mauvaises gens is, though, far from being a simple pictorial rendition of a slice of social history. Davodeau himself describes this work as a 'documentaire en bande dessinee' ['a documentary in comics format'], and notes that the advantage this medium has over a filmed documentary is that there is no technical interface, like a camera or microphone, between him and his subjects.3 The classic linearity of the film documentary or journalistic reportage is, however, replaced here by a complex juxtaposition of timeframes and images, in which the past is apposed to the present, and the general to the specific. This article firstly considers the techniques used by Davodeau to reinforce his claim to documentary accuracy. It then looks at the way in which he plays with the content, dimension and layout of his panels, and with their organisation relative to each other, to give an intense emotional resonance to this collective memory of an entire generation of French men and women. The article goes on to analyse the coexistence of historical time and place with the present, where the reader is firmly grounded by the narrator's voice. In Les Mauvaises gens, time speeds up, slows down, freezes, and loops back on itself. Our study analyses how this constant changing of tempo and direction not only renders more vivid the universal struggle that Davodeau has chosen for his subject, but also enables Davodeau to express some of the anxieties and delicate negotiations arising out of his endeavour to tell someone else's story. …