Why no war in French comics? The Trente Glorieuses and redrawing of the second thirty years war

Abstract

This article looks at transitions in representations of war and Occupation across three cartoon journals for children published in France between the Liberation and the early 1970s: Coeurs vaillants, Coq hardi and Pilote. The comics censorship legislation of 1949 and 1952 is examined as a palliative response to war trauma experienced by children and by their parents across both world wars. The rejection of war is also traced back to the efforts of inter-war peacemakers to engender cross-cultural tolerance in the minds of the young and the French state’s careful management of war memory throughout the period of the “trente glorieuses”. Finally, the article explores how the early strategies adopted for the representation of war shifted in line with socio-cultural change and, in particular, the politicisation of authors and readers after ‘68. Analyses of strips from Pilote hebdomadaire between 1960 and the early 1970s show how the distorted memorialisation of the Occupation in the Gaullist era became a target for a contestatory rewriting of war into cartoons.

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Item Type:	Article
Authors/Creators:	Michallat, W. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2042-1702
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information:	© 2025 The Authors. Except as otherwise noted, this author-accepted version of a journal article published in Contemporary French and Francophone Studies is made available via the University of Sheffield Research Publications and Copyright Policy under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ © 2025 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
Keywords:	comics; war; censorship; children; trauma
Dates:	Accepted: 1 April 2025 Published (online): 9 May 2025 Published: 9 May 2025
Institution:	The University of Sheffield
Academic Units:	The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Arts and Humanities (Sheffield) > School of Languages and Cultures (Sheffield)
Depositing User:	Symplectic Sheffield
Date Deposited:	14 Apr 2025 14:10
Last Modified:	14 May 2025 10:50
Status:	Published
Publisher:	Taylor and Francis Group
Refereed:	Yes
Identification Number:	10.1080/17409292.2025.2488614
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID):	oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:225431

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Why no war in French comics? The Trente Glorieuses and redrawing of the second thirty years war

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