Angoulême (AFP)

It's not a simple comic book album, it's an epic. The first volume of "Révolution", a lively book on the French Revolution, written and drawn by Florent Grouazel and Younn Locard, won the Fauve d'or at the Angoulême festival on Saturday.

This choice resonates particularly when comic artists and scriptwriters are finding it increasingly difficult to make a living from their boards and are demanding an improvement in their economic and social situation.

Published by Actes Sud / L'An 2, "Révolution", an ambitious and remarkably documented album (336 pages, 26 euros), released in January 2019, is the first part of a trilogy devoted to the Revolution.

Written and drawn by Florent Grouazel, 33 and Younn Locard, 36, who alternate every 15 or 20 pages, this first section (called "Liberty") retraces the events that occurred between the months of May and October 1789 while the capital is immersed in the tumult of the Estates General and that opinion is still united around the person of the King.

It is unusual in the same comic strip to have different graphic styles, but the two authors, who went through the Saint-Luc Institute in Brussels, a veritable breeding ground for comic strip talents, manage to make the reading of their album. We can easily recognize the main characters. The drawings were made in pen with Indian ink, the colors are simple and refined.

We see Marat, Lafayette, Robespierre pass but this fascinating story of the French Revolution is meant to stand alongside the people.

We follow a street kid, a pamphlete journalist and agitator, two twin aristocrats from their native Brittany, a fishmonger from Les Halles, an English philosopher ... How is invented in the tumult of new ways of living and fighting? What use should you make of yourself in such an era? Each of the characters tries, day after day, in the general irresolution, to bring his personal answer to these questions.

We obviously can not help drawing a parallel with the movement of "yellow vests" (which had not started when the two authors started their fresco). Asked about this coincidence, the two designers explain that "it is disturbing to see how similar these movements are ... People are trying to make their claims heard and no one has seen them coming".

- Raised fists -

"We hope that this book resonates particularly today," said Younn Locard while receiving the Fauve d'or alongside Florent Graouzel.

The 47th edition of the Angoulême comic book festival, which ends on Sunday, was marked by the revolt of comic book authors who denounced the "precariousness" of their profession while 2020 was proclaimed "comic book year".

At the Fauves award ceremony, Gwen de Bonneval and Fabien Vehlmann, winners of the Goscinny Prize, said that they would not go to Angoulême "until the environment changes". Several dozen authors went up on the stage of the Angoulême theater to recall that "without author and author, there is no comic strip". Emmanuel Moynot, winner of the Prix du Polar, came to get his barefoot prize. "I have always been on the side of barefoot," he said before calling the authors to "move".

At the end of the ceremony, all the winners returned to the stage with their fists raised.

Cartoonists and comic writers consider themselves "the victims of the economic miracle of publishing". The French comic book market broke a new record in 2019, thanks to an 11% jump in sales but "more than 50% of professional authors are below the minimum wage, more than 30% below the threshold of poverty ", noted this week the collective" Authors in action ".

© 2020 AFP