“Revolution”: how comics have won the admiration of historians

This is the amazing story of two prominent young cartoonists who, in the middle of the promotion for an album with a 50,000 copy print run, let you go: “What fascinates us above all is the genealogy of ideas. » Within the rapidly expanding universe of historical comics, where ever-denser heaps of adventure stories, comic biographies and other “illustrated stories” collide – from the IV^e Republic, sexuality or football – Florent Grouazel and Younn Locard are solitary stars.

The two Bretons, who studied comics together in Brussels after meeting in a Lorient high school, very early formed a certain idea of ​​the 9^e art. Published in 2013, “Eloi”, their first joint album, resulting from a graduation project, is already an adventure as intellectual as it is artistic. Inspired by a course on the visual imaginary of medicine, Grouazel and Locard set up a colonial narrative against a backdrop of the pseudoscientific construction of racism. They are not, then, great enthusiasts of history but document themselves very seriously. On the strength of the few boards that at the beginning of the project they send to publishers like a bottle in the sea, Thierry Groensteen, director of the demanding comic book collection L’An 2, at Actes Sud, offers them to publish this coup d’art. ‘trial. “I was struck by the intelligence of their approach to historical questions”remembers the publisher who, after the critical success of “Eloi”, gave them carte blanche for a