The Somme tourist board

Tardi’s works have widely explored the First World War. Graphic novels such as C’était la guerre des tranchées (It was trench warfare), La fleur au fusil (The flower in the rifle) or Varlot soldat (Soldier Varlot) are veritable objects of cultural mediation which, with varying degrees of objectivity, have helped to shape a visual memory of the Great War.

This vast exhibition devoted to Tardi shows how such a memory is constituted through the different filters of culture and remembrance along a creator’s itinerary: indirect testimony (third generation), the use of historical and museological sources, artistic influences.

Thus, if Tardi’s work indirectly reflects his grandfather’s stories, this kind of evidence has to be closely re-examined in the light of historical research because the very ‘use’ of such a witness introduces emotion and compassion into the resulting account.

In the context of several recent events in France – the publication of letters and diaries from the front (Paroles de poilus, 1914-1918) and the passing of France’s last surviving veteran in 2008 – it has seemed particularly interesting to consider Tardi’s (re)presentation of the Great War, the ‘genealogy’ of the images, the relationships between time periods and narratives, memory and forgetting, or truth and subjectivity, in order to understand the impact of his work on collective mentalities. Indeed, Tardi remains an essential model for other comics’ authors venturing onto the terrain of the Great War.