12 - Across the Waves: Benoîte Groult, Catel Muller and bande dessinée

Summary

This chapter looks at how bande dessinee (BD) has become an important tool to communicate a feminist message, one which is increasingly used in the twenty-first century to pass on the ‘herstory’ of feminism and of the second wave women's movement in particular. The transmission and reception of women's stories between generations is itself part of a feminist campaign of consciousness raising and this chapter argues that the pedagogic mission of some works by bande dessinee authors has an important role to play in this process in contemporary France. After a brief contextualisation, this chapter will focus on the 2013 graphic novel Ainsi soit Benoite Groult by Catel Muller (writing as Catel), which brings to life the personal trajectory of the public feminist figure Benoîte Groult and also depicts the friendship which developed between Groult and Catel during the production of the book. In addition to published sources, this chapter draws on an interview conducted with Catel in Paris in September 2016.

The death of Benoîte Groult in June 2016 at the age of 96, some three years after the publication of Ainsi soit Benoite Groult, meant that French feminism lost one of its important figures, one whose life and work spanned several generations and many of the conflicts and crises of the twentieth century. In many ways, Groult was an unusual feminist, espousing views too moderate for the most radical tendencies of French feminism and thus often depicted as an ‘equality’ or ‘unaggressive feminist’ (Brochier, 1975, 66). Yet Groult was no mild-mannered advocate of women's rights. Rather, she used humour, especially irony and sarcasm, as a way to critique patriarchal society and call for change. The fact that on her death the contemporary feminist magazine Causette paid tribute to Groult as one of their ‘first subscribers’, likening Causette to F Magazine, the publication Groult co-founded, is indicative of the cross-generational appeal of this feminist figure.

Born in Strasbourg in 1964, Catel is a little older than the core readership targeted by Causette. Catel is instead part of the generation which followed that of the second wave feminists and for whom Groult’s texts served both to explain and educate those too young to have remembered much of the 1970s themselves, an era characterised by its tumultuous but liberating times.