Imagining the first French empire: Bande dessinée and the Atlantic

Abstract

First paragraph: A page nearly half-way through Patrick Prugne’s 2011 album, Frenchman, forms one starting point for this discussion. Alban Labiche is the eponymous young Frenchman who, through the manipulation of his aristocratic neighbour in Normandy, has been drafted into Bonaparte’s armed forces and sent to New Orleans on the eve of the handover of Louisiana to the United States in 1803. Having rescued a slave from arbitrary execution by his master, Labiche now finds himself a deserter and accompanying the gruff old French-Canadian fur trader Toussaint Charbonneau northwards towards St Louis, where the latter is to join the Lewis and Clark expedition (which will of course open up the Pacific North-West for American exploration and settlement). The page (Prugne 2011, p. 35) asymmetrically and elliptically combines several procedures which contribute to the classic, linear journey narrative but which have wider, even much wider, metonymic implications.