There “Sleeping Beauty of the Forest”As Carine Picaud, a curator at the French National Library (BNF) specializing in children’s books in the Rare Book Reserve, calls it, she is slowly emerging from her dream. Excluded for a long time from the programming and acquisition policies of the great French cultural institutions, comics could notably enter, at the end of the year, the collections of the public establishment dedicated to printing, at its site in Tolbiac (Paris). 13my).
It would not be new, but the operation is important: the appropriation of the original plates of The beast is dead! jewel of the history of the ninth art. Created clandestinely during the Occupation by the illustrator Edmond-François Calvo (1892-1957) based on texts by Victor Dancette (1900-1975) and Jacques Zimmermann (1902-1951), this story tells almost live the events of the Second World War to through animals. characters.
The BNF already has more than a thousand original comics: three complete albums ofAsterix the Gaul offered during his lifetime by Albert Uderzo (1927-2020) in 2011; seven volumes of the series dark cities data from François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters in 2016; and a set of various pieces by F’murr (1946-2018) – plates, sketches, storyboards, etc. – donated to the State in 2021. The difference, here, is the very nature of the acquisition: a subscription, the amount of which must reach 875,000 euros, before December 31. Bound by Calvo himself, the set of seventy-seven plates has been classified as a work of great heritage interest, which allows it to benefit from the tax exemption. As soon as the purchase offer is launched, “There was no doubt that we had to acquire this collection as a national treasure”indicates Carine Picaud.
The fate of the Jews is mentioned.
With the exception of one page, mysteriously missing, but which appears in the printed version (republished by Futuropolis in the mid-1970s, and currently by Gallimard), the lot remained in the hands of the Calvo family. He never stopped lending boards for exhibitions. Currently we can see fifteen of them at the Pompidou Center in Paris, through the exhibition “Comics on all floors”, until November 4, and as many at the Memorial of the internment and deportation of Compiègne (Oise), until on January 5th. , 2025. The work is exceptional in more ways than one.
Edmond-François Calvo, former owner of a hotel restaurant, decided, at the age of 46, to dedicate himself to his only passion, drawing, and displays a graphic ease in the caricatured representation of animals that earned him the nickname “French Disney.” “. Used under the veneer of a children’s album, the process of anthropomorphism: the French incarnate in rabbits and squirrels, the Nazis in wolves, the Americans in liberating bison; General De Gaulle has the head of a stork and Goering, of a pig, but he adorns the story with an undeniable historical dimension.
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