The Colonial Heritage of French Comics by Mark McKinney

Abstract

temperament to make education central to the future republic. The aesthetic and social tensions mingling in David’s Les Sabines (1799), treated in chapter 8, bring to a splendid close this work’s display of Halliday’s erudition and keen sense of how to impart art’s provocative richness as a cultural archive. Colby College (ME) Adrianna M. Paliyenko MCKINNEY, MARK. The Colonial Heritage of French Comics. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2011. ISBN 978-1-84631-642-5. Pp. 270. £65. McKinney goes beyond the aesthetic merits of Franco-Belgian bandes dessinées (BD) to investigate the genre’s colonialist underpinnings. According to the author, many of the cartoonists held in high esteem by critics and fans alike demonstrated colonialist, racist, and anti-Semitic tendencies. McKinney links successful BD such as Zig et Puce, Tintin, Spirou, and Bécassine with imperialism and French and Belgian colonialist themes. These BD have become a part of the national patrimony and cultural capital. Subtly propagandistic, they fit into the literature celebrating the mission civilisatrice of France and Belgium. When viewed within the pedagogy of empire, the early BD of the twentieth-century colonial era illustrate the classic literary ideal of plaire et instruire. As a postcolonial literary critic, McKinney reflects on the degree of culpability of French-language cartoonists in disseminating racist, imperialist stereotypes and prejudices. Their works enjoyed a wide-ranging readership from all age groups in France, Belgium, and throughout the world. Negative stereotypical figures inhabit French-language BD from the 1920s: Saint-Ogan’s Zig et Puce and Hergé’s Tintin feature grotesque, childish Africans, exotic snakes, sacred cows, elephants, and interminable Saharan sand dunes. These BD characters spill over into popular culture through the advertising world as illustrations for European products such as Banania during the colonial era. Two events are seen by McKinney as major myth-making sources of inspiration for early French-language cartoonists: the Exposition coloniale internationale held in Paris in 1931, and the 1924–25 Citroën-sponsored Croisière noire road trip across the African continent. The latter became the annual off-road Paris-Dakar automobile race, which began in 1979. The 1931 Exposition, with its human zoo and other sensational attractions, serves for the author as a pivotal moment of a colonial ideology that was permeating French culture, even into BD and children’s literature. Both events fed cartoonists’ imaginations and helped develop the nationalist construction of the French-language BD canon. Since the 1980s there has been a resurgence of popularity for BD with colonial exhibitions and their exploitation of indigenous peoples as themes. BD magazines play a role in this renewed interest in the colonial era, as does the reissuing of BD from that period. In light of this resurgence, McKinney encourages his readers “to investigate today’s images of colonial and exotic others in French popular culture, including comics” (104). Stereotypes die hard, especially when they vividly appeal to fans’ imaginations. McKinney’s study, as well as the works that he references, may be disquieting for the BD enthusiast who has fallen prey to the insidious humor created by the juxtaposition of European cultural ideals and offensive stereotypes of colonized peoples. McKinney’s contribution to the growing number of works offering a postcolonial critical examination of the Franco-Belgian BD canon from the first Reviews 405 half of the twentieth century is serious and solid. The work is well illustrated, with 26 colored plates and eleven images. Despite its high cost, this is a good read for anyone interested in French and Belgian colonial history or in the history of the well-respected ninth art. Indiana University-Purdue University, Rosalie A. Vermette Indianapolis, emerita ROBERT, PHILIPPE DE, CLAUDINE PAILHÈS, et HUBERT BOST, éd. Le rayonnement de Bayle. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2010. ISBN 978-0-7294-0995-7. Pp. ix + 319. $115. Pierre Bayle is not widely known by American students of French nowadays , and more is the pity. Even the few pages of the Dictionnaire historique et critique that previous generations usually read could remind the budding scholar of how topical this laborious and erudite writer was, with his love of justice, pleas for toleration, ideals of community, and his...