La BD d’affaires en France, une autre exception française? L’exemple de largo winch

Abstract

Business fiction is a fiction that puts business issues, characters, institutions and mechanisms center stage. Using Jean Van Hamme’s popular series, Largo Winch (published from 1990 to today), as an example, I show why and how the “genre” seems to have strongly reemerged in the last 20 years in France after several decades of quasi-absence. This reemergence is obvious in various media but it is especially in the uniquely French tradition of the comics that the “fiction d’affaires” has recently boomed in quantity and quality: From Asterix: Obelix et Compagnie (1976) to Van Hamme’s other series, Les Maitres de l’orge (1990–1997) and Farid Boudjellal’s Le Beurgeois (1993), as well as Van Hamme’s follwers' series like Stephen Desberg's IR$ (1999–) and the financial reporter of La Tribune and Les Echos, Philippe Guillaume (Dantes: La Chute d’un trader, 2007–). It seems that many in the French intellectual and artistic milieux might have become more skeptical about the French Exception ideology and about what have been a taboo for a long time, that is, to “talk” (about) business.