Elise and the New Partisans. Dominique Grange and Jacques Tardi. Translated by Jenna Allen. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2024. 179pp, $29.95.
Guest Review by Paul Buhle
The advance publicity on this book suggests that every new volume drawn by Jacques Tardi is a literary event, in this case very much a political event as well. Tardi is a famed French illustrator and comic artist, best known on this side of the pond for his grueling portrayal of soldiers in the First World War. His collaborator, a veteran musician, theatrical personage and above all political agitator, has obviously offered Tardi a story of her generational experience. She is or could be Elise of the title, but more likely, this is a collective recollection.
The “French ’68,” so vividly publicized at the time as the rebellion of the young, including slogans like “The More I Make Love, The More I Want to Make Revolution,” with the photo of a young man and women kissing, obviously behind a Paris barricade. It may seem preposterous now. But the sentiments of the moment perfectly suited the utopian hopes that rattled through Germany, Czechoslovakia, Italy, Scandinavia and at least the campuses of the US (and Canada) along with the college settings of France far from Paris. De Gaulle fled to Germany, industrial workers went out (or occupied the factories) and then…it all came to a halt, more or less.
There is no doubt that the rebellious moment changed college education. In France, it was said no one before 1970 could possibly be allowed to write a dissertation on comic art. After 1970, hardly anything could be forbidden, also true, perhaps more true, about sex and fashion. Underground comix, barely emerging in 1969 with a few books and semi-regular appearances on the underground press, fairly led the global project of repudiating all previously existing limitations or comic art censorship.
We have more trouble remembering “the Militants,” as the hard core were called in France and some other places. In truth, millions of them far from Europe and North America, experiencing something similar across the global map. The utopian expectations but also the willingness to take risks confronting authorities of all kinds, are especially foggy in collective memory. Even more so with Elise and her many counterparts who rose up bravely to defend minority populations, to fight the cops who had no compunction in their brutality, but also pledged themselves, often enough, to….Chairman Mao.
Grange and Tardi offer us a text, narrative and visual, of great historical importance and great candor. Grange begins back in 1958 when, as a kid, she realizes how terrible the conditions of Algerians are in the Nanterre slums and how closely this bears upon the pitiless conflict in Algeria itself. Some thirty thousand slum-dwellers, called to action by the Algerian rebels, streamed into the city, met by police who took great pleasure in bashing heads and shooting into a crowd in retreat.
Campus radicals in the US, hailing the traditions of the Abolitionists, had nothing so vivid as the French, with their sense of history, the hallowed saga of repeated revolts and repeated horrors brought back to memory—all the way to the French Revolution. One French memory was not so far away in time, and gave spirit to the 1960s demonstrators as well as the title of this book: the Partisan antifascists all across Europe. Young French radicals recalled to memory the conservatives who made their peace with the Germans and turned over the Jews, stealing Jewish property in the meantime.
It is difficult for Americans to appreciate this point fully, and its connections with the Left. In France of the 1960s, the much-damaged reputation of the Communist Party (including constant apologies for the USSR) retained, nevertheless, the collective memory of vast wartime courage, self-sacrifice, and the skills acquired in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) remained vivid in some quarters. And of the Popular Front that brought protections and gains to the mass of ordinary people, as the New Deal did in the US.
A major theme of the comic is the duality of the Communist Party presence. Party leaders called out thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of workers, and others against police brutality and various anti-working class issues. The same Party leaders repeatedly pulled back at moments of extreme crisis. They were looking to the next election or stuck in bureaucratic top-down command styles not so different from the AFL-CIO. Thus, a major motif of The New Partisans is the appeal to rank-and-file Communists against the leaders.
The other motif is the life of the ardent feminist, musician, singer and agitator of the title. She is always on the run, often from the authorities and when not, moving from one emerging struggle to another. She is ignorant and/or foolish enough to get herself injured trying to make a bomb. She is brave enough to expose herself to official violence dozens of times through the book and perform, indeed create, a rebellious culture for ordinary radicals and bystanders.
Her grandfather, remembered fondly, taught her music, both traditional French songs and political songs. In boarding school, she was already singing the ballads of indigenous peoples in South America, recalling the resistance to the European invaders. Like the rest of us her cohort in the 1950s, she was listening to American blues records including the political ones about racism and war. This reviewer was, too, and feels the thrill of recognition in the international significance of African-American music.
Her musician friends join her in singing at huge rallies in 1968-69, moving on to factories that workers had seized, and then onward, city after city, finding and creating crowds in the process. “DOWN WITH THE POLICE STATE, DOWN WITH THE POLICE STATE,” phrases they could barely utter in Avignon before the club-swinging cops closed in. A festival crowd may possibly have “heard” the old tunes and the dance melodies, the reels, as much as the political verses. Elise and her friends were revolutionary entertainers.
She recalls most of all, perhaps, that when they abandoned the big cities for the small towns, seeking escape from the authorities, they were greeted warmly by ordinary folk who came to see the cheaply-made documentary films and the music from the heart of the struggles. In municipal halls, in barns and in village squares, the celebratory atmosphere continued for one historical moment. Change was possible!
Our heroine and her friends create and sell their own records (“for 3 Francs”) and agitate at Vincennes, a university opened to all by protest. Soon, however, she is arrested, dragged away to a hospital repurposed as a holding center, beaten and insulted by waiting police. Taking another tack, she becomes a Maoist and moves into factory work, as youngsters of the time were urged to do. In short order, she is abused ideologically, by her new comrades, for not being rigid enough. She endures.
A new wave of factory struggles, in 1970, leads to one last round of music-making and one last grand round of repression. This time old-timers from the 1940s Resistance come out in protest. By 1971, many banners read “We Are the New Partisans.”
It is easy to forget—we got a milder dose in the Reaganism still years ahead—that European neo-fascist movements made their opening move of today’s ominous renewal just at this moment. These were the “forces of order,” and immigrant workers would be their main victims, anticipating Le Pen’s slogans and rise to influence in the current century. As for our heroine, she finds herself sentenced to prison in Lyon, with her mother now visiting regularly.
Writing songs for fellow prisoners is, in a sense, the parting act for the book. One struggle after another follows, the most militant as likely to be protests over the US coup in Chile as the continuing strikes and takeovers in factories. The comic recalls, on the last page, that by 1978, a handful of repentant and well-paid Parisian intellectuals had gained popularity by “trying to erase our traces by downplaying or ridiculing the revolutionary spirit of an entire generation.” (p.170).
I’ve skipped over a mini-career editing BD Comics, a comics magazine to rival (or counter) the hugely popular but more sexist and mean spirited Charlie Hebdo. Her partner/lover, a comic artist, falls apart and eventually dies of a drug overdose. On a nearby page, she renounces the very bad side of Maoism. But these are only incidents in a seeming endless life of struggle. It is the life she knows.
If Elise and the New Partisans is surely not altogether autobiographical—more properly the saga of a revolutionary generation now reaching an old age—it might as well be. The youngsters were real, in their aspirations, their support for besieged populations everywhere, and just as real in some of their unwise tactics and ideological obsessions. Jacques Tardi and Dominque Grange have done a great thing bringing their stories back to life.
Paul Buhle was editor/publisher of the SDS journal Radical America.
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