The representation of history in the <i>Histoire de France en bandes dessinées</i> : multimodality in the context of text types and selection processes

Abstract The Histoire de France en bandes dessinées (HFBD) is a comic book, published in 8 volumes (Paris: Larousse 1976–1980), which contains different episodes of French history from the Roman conquest and the Gallic resistance, the kingdom of the Middle Ages, the French Revolution until World War I and II and the founding of the Fifth Republic (1958). This comic book focuses on famous historical events or figures, aiming at historical accuracy, but the selection of the episodes is also driven by an educational purpose. The present analysis emphasizes the multimodal element in this conception and its semiotic implications. A crucial issue in this context is to disclose the complex correlations between different kinds of image sections and various text elements (captions, speech bubbles etc.), their framing and arrangement. Furthermore, this special text type of a historic comic book plays a decisive role, as the reader has to be accustomed to the conventions of decoding the multimodal elements, a process which slightly differs in comparison to a conventional cartoon. Finally, the displayed historical events must have gone through an implicit selection process, which should be disclosed in the context of the conception of the HFBD in the late 1970s and early 1980s.