Marie Gabrielle de Saint-Eutrope

Marie Gabrielle de Saint-Eutrope is the heroine of a three-part comic series by the French draftsman Georges Pichard . Marie Gabrielle is a classic of graphic BDSM literature and the most sensational, socially controversial work by Pichard, which to this day is one of the most controversial strips in the Franco-Belgian comic scene .

action

The story takes place in France in the early 19th century (note: during the lifetime of the Marquis de Sade and the time of the novel The Count of Monte Christo ).

The first volume begins with the tale of suffering of a certain Josepha, who then begins to tell the story of her friend Marie Gabrielle. Marie Gabrielle is the young (early 20s) wife of an old (at least 60) count. She is virtuous, strictly religious and, as it turns out later, probably latently sadomasochistic. The local priest then visits Marie Gabrielle to ask her to accept as a servant an inmate of the so-called Sainte-Madeleine de la Rédemption convent , who is about to be released on probation. Marie Gabrielle agrees, but the priest is irritated that Marie Gabrielle makes no move to seduce him (and thereby deny him the fame of valiantly renouncing sin). He then decides to punish her for this and to forge a conspiracy so that Marie Gabrielle herself is admitted to the said penal monastery.

Marie Gabrielle and her husband visit the penal monastery from which they are supposed to pick up the inmate named Zulma. The monastery is run by nuns who belong to a barefoot order . The prisoners are also, without exception, barefoot.
This is characteristic of the comics by Georges Pichard , in which the female victim characters appear almost continuously barefoot and, depending on the situation, often have to do this under duress or against their will. In certain situations of greater distress, their bare soles are often shown directly. This stylistic device can be seen as a symbol for a particularly serious degradation or powerlessness to which the character in the stories is exposed. This is also often the case in the story of Marie Gabrielle de Saint-Eutrope. Usually this concerns particular predicaments where she cannot escape the situation, for example because she is tied up. The soles of the feet, which are presented to the reader and mostly also to the viewer in the stories, strikingly highlight the humiliation of the characters and intensify them. In this story, the bare soles of the prisoners and especially those of Marie Gabrielle can be seen again and again in the later course of the story. In the case of the authoritarian nuns, however, their feet are consistently only visible from above.
The convicted women are mainly imprisoned in this penal monastery for offenses such as fornication, adultery or willful failure to attend mass. These are tied up again and again, sometimes in a highly exaggerated manner, and punished for the slightest violations, as well as consistently used for heavy forced labor.

While Marie Gabrielle's husband is shocked and disturbed by what has happened, she shows herself taken with the methods there and weighs her down. All of this is not as bad as what happened to a friend of hers. She then briefly tells the story of a girl who was sent to an asylum for masturbation, in order to cure her with corporal punishment, some of which was cruel.

Then they bring the prisoner Zulma to their home as a servant. On the way to the manor house, she is still handcuffed with iron. Despite the meanwhile normal everyday clothing, she is still barefoot, while in contrast Marie Gabrielle wears fine, closed shoes with white stockings and otherwise recognizable upscale clothing. On the way she tells Marie Gabrielle her life story. Most of all, she deals with fornication, adultery, same-sex sexual acts among women and their eventual admission to the penal monastery, which ends Volume I.

Volume II begins with further accounts of Zulma from her imprisonment in the penal monastery, which confuse Marie Gabrielle because they trigger sadomasochistic fantasies in her. The Zulma, who has actually been released, has to remain barefoot in the service of Marie Gabrielle and often wear iron shackles on her feet. During the night she is always chained to a wall with shackles. In the further course, Marie Gabrielle becomes more and more sadistic towards her servant Zulma, who often punishes her harshly and cruelly for trivial reasons. During this time, the priest contacts Zulma in order to use them for his vengeance plot against Marie Gabrielle.

Zulma now couples Marie Gabrielle with a young, handsome officer, while she herself seduces the old count. The situation comes to a head in a scene in which Marie Gabrielle shoots her husband twice, but accidentally kills her lover. The priest appears quickly, as planned, and arranges for Marie Gabrielle to be charged with murder and fornication in the criminal court.
Before the trial, Marie Gabrielle has to completely take off her elegant clothing. A nun from the monastery prison shown at the beginning of this trip, who is to prepare Marie Gabrielle for the trial and then to assist in her conviction, gives her a series of instructions, which she is reasonably composed and followed without objection. She is not allowed to wear anything more than a short shirt and has to go barefoot into the court, her fine clothing is not appropriate for a defendant to be tried.

"The culprit is dressed in a short shirt, to be sentenced on bare feet and chained". With these words, the dismayed Marie Gabrielle continues to unmoved by the nun, teaching the instructions of the criminal court. Meanwhile, the prisoner's shirt is hanging on the wall along with the bells and chains intended to tie her up. She continues to follow the instructions cautiously, but asks the nun, intimidated, how long she will have to stay in prison. The only answer she gets is that this will probably be a very long time for her crimes, especially because of her adultery. When Marie Gabrielle now stands there in the prisoner's shirt, with her hair down and, as ordered by the nun, only on bare feet, she immediately gets her hands chained tight behind her back with the iron bells. Next, she is instructed by the nun to sit high on the table, as her feet have to be put in iron shackles.
While Marie Gabrielle's feet are then hanging in the air, tied with bells and chains, her bare soles can now be seen from below. This symbol introduces the further development in which Marie Gabrielle's doom takes its course. From now on she has practically no influence on the following events, but is largely at the mercy of the authorities. While Marie Gabrielle is being led into the courtroom on a chain, the nun asks if she is ashamed too. While only her bound bare feet are shown, she intimidated in the affirmative to this question.

In the courtroom, the viewers are repeatedly shown Marie Gabrielle's bare soles, which can be seen as a symbol of her hopeless situation. Marie Gabrielle is sentenced to 15 years in prison and is whipped in the courtroom as part of the sentence. Marie Gabrielle, for her part, is now supposed to be brought to the penal monastery visited at the beginning as a convict and sold as a slave after serving her sentence.

The night after the trial, Marie Gabrielle has to spend chained up in dungeon. In the morning, however, she shows another demeanor when she protests to the nun against being brought to the monastery prison in only the prisoner's shirt and insists on being allowed to put on her own fine clothes again. The nun gives in to her at first, but complains before the removal of Marie Gabrielle's footwear, which she had also put on again - she has to take off her shoes and stockings. The viewer then sees how Marie Gabrielle bares her feet again, after which her hands are tied behind her back with iron cuffs. She is then, now barefoot again, chained to the carriage behind which she is supposed to run on the long way to the prison, while the nuns take their seats in the interior.
The greater part of the second volume tells Marie Gabrielles experiences in the monastery.

After a long period of suffering in prison, she is released early enough and in the end finds her true love in complete poverty. Marie Gabrielle remains barefoot until the end of the story from Volume II and has no shoes back in freedom.

Finally, the third volume is mostly about a completely different woman who, as usual, is constantly beaten by fate. As a child she was kidnapped by gypsies, raised there as a slave under severe punishments, then went to prison, was transferred from there to an insane asylum with torture treatment, then sold as a slave in the Orient and finally rescued, only to fall into the hands of a pervert Psychopath, who, as it turns out, is the one Marie Gabrielle is now living with. This in turn has now also recognized that her lover is not the good, dear man after all, as she believed, and helps the captured women to rebel against him and to flee with them.

Emergence

The story of Marie Gabrielle goes back to Samuel Richardson , who founded the so-called sensitive novel with Pamela or Virtue Revarded (1740) in which innocent girls suffer unspeakable things. Richardson's epistolary novel describes melodramatically and from a voyeuristic point of view young, persecuted innocence, who is tormented by a monster, but in the end accepts her situation and marries the tormentor. In the “keyhole-like” perspective, in reading other people's letters, there is a particular attraction of indiscretion, which provokes an immediate, highly emotional, participatory attitude. At the same time, Pichard relies on the narrative technique of de Sade, who with his Justine (the title Justine ou les Malheurs de la vertu has become a household word and a synonym for the suffering of naive heroines) immediately turned the hypocritical Pamela into its opposite. Like Pamela and Justine, Marie Gabrielle is one of those innocent, naive heroines who are repeatedly tormented and sexually harassed. At Pichard, the obscene essence is distilled from extreme situations picked out and worked up in drawings. Everything that the inventors of the Comics Code didn't want to see on the Strips in terms of sexual perversions is shown here. Cruelty, sadistic violence, sadomasochism, flagellantism, implied sodomy and fetishism are the order of the day in history. Marie Gabrielle goes through the hell of sexual cliché situations - everything that can be done with a woman's body, especially in the borderline cases of sexual pathology, is done on her. Stories by Erich von Götha and The Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist by Michael O'Donoghue and Frank Springer show how little the recipe has lost of its effect on comics since the appearance of Marie Gabrielle .

publication

The first two albums were published in 1977 by the Glénat publishing house in Grenoble as lavishly furnished, linen-bound volumes and large-format slip cases. The indexing of the first two parts did not prevent the publisher from bringing out a sequel in 1982. Even before Marie Gabrielle was published, Pichard became known for his successful, non-self-written erotic series Paulette and Blanche Epiphany, especially in France.

criticism

The questionable moral of the demonic story is not really convincing and the criticism is ruthless with Marie Gabrielle . Many see Marie Gabrielle only as dubious entertainment for voyeurs , because the comic may correspond directly to the secret wishes, inclinations and repressed fantasies of its readers. In the opinion of Michael Bourgeois , who also saw this corrupting effect of the comics as the incentive to read them, one succumbs to the fascination of the nefarious imagery also for the reason that Pichard's Marie Gabrielle albums are bizarre, extremely provocative and sometimes absurd Has developed humor. The panels of the comic draw their strength from the play-out and conscious use of absurd imbalances and absurdities in a bizarre-surreal dream world . The secret of their special effect lies in the pairing of the limitless exaggeration à la Münchhausen with the burlesque pointing through artistically skillful and very plastic line drawings.

With his grotesque humor and ironic corruption of strict Catholic upbringing, Pichard tries to expose the sexual suppression of church morality . In the 17th century, for example, the church and state began to regulate the basis and form of marriage. Until then, the so-called free marriage vows of the man and the execution through sexual intercourse were valid . Now, however, the wedding becomes an ecclesiastical and state affair and unapproved sex becomes an engagement with the devil. In fact, one practiced for a long time in monasteries during the exorcism extreme rigor in education through sanctions such as physical punishment , submission, complete deprivation of liberty and total restriction of personal rights, detention etc. With these dark times, the artist worked in his detailed studies: cruel floggings and Torture was seen as a common means of discipline. Violence - as a legitimate means of upbringing - used to emanate mostly from nuns. The pupils were usually female victims. Pichard, however, expresses it with misogynous ridicule and grim irony: “Infidelity wives, unruly maids and other 'lewd women' can be brought to a nunnery for re-education. Since the body is the bearer of sin, it is there that the body is chastened. Woman is made to suffer and she has to atone for her original sin of being a woman. ”He assumes women have a general tendency towards masochism :“ It is also interesting to note that she doesn't even complain about it. She is subjugated and accepts this mockery like a repentant sinner, as a punishment from God, a condemnation and as a moral must. "

However, according to his own statements, Pichard is far from acquitting the author of these events and condemns all kinds of Puritanism with its bestiality, witch hunts , exorcisms , etc. as they were common in the past centuries. With statements like these, Pichard not only shows the arbitrariness of disenfranchisement and discrimination, he also questions apparently unchangeable instances such as the “nature” of women, sometimes exposing them as a construct that is always called in to help when it is necessary to legally put women in their place: an insight that has not lost any of its relevance today. To make this clear, Pichard employs ancient idioms in Marie Gabrielle and uses distant and ironic language. Rather, he sees himself in the tradition of Mirabeau , who with his frivolous enlightenment book of education criticizes the bourgeois double standards and stands for the sexual freedom of women. Marie Gabrielle describes the procedures used by church and state to enforce total control of women right into their privacy. At the same time, the porn theater from Rue de la Santé and scenes à la Le Sentiment de La Famille by Pierre Louÿs also appear in Marie Gabrielle .

Andreas C. Knigge claims that there is nothing of the intelligently arranged pasties from Paulette or Blanche Epiphany , but rather “a hatred of women that has not yet been presented in this form in the comic medium . [...] Pichard's story seems sudden and tense because he subordinates it to a socially critical message, which in turn only wants to disguise a lascivious aestheticization of violence against women. The intention here seems to be to attract the attention of potential buyers by provoking a scandal. That had already worked for Barbarella 15 years ago , and the slamming of the censors naturally attracted the public's attention here too. The difference, though, is that in the event Barbarella's only the limit of an on coming morale has been exceeded while in Pichard Marie Gabrielle clearly the dignity of man has overridden. "( Sex in the Comics. S. 189). Knigge sees Pichard's comic pamphlet in the tradition of misogynist scientists, philosophers and writers such as Paul Julius Möbius , Friedrich Nietzsche or August Strindberg .

literature

Michel Bourgeois: Eroticism and Pornography in the Comic Strip (Erotisme et pornographie dans la bande dessinée). Volksverlag, Linden 1981, ISBN 3-88631-043-4 (from the French by Michael Richardt).
Michel Bourgeois: The erotic work of Georges Pichard (L'œuvre érotique de Georges Pichard, 1981). Bahia Verlag, Munich 1982, ISBN 3-922699-11-1 .
Johannes Hösle: The black romance of the porn comics. In: Fabula . Journal of story research. Vol. 19, Issue 1, 1978, ISSN 0014-6242 , pp. 252-261
Andreas C. Knigge : Sex in comics. Ullstein Verlag, Berlin 1985, ISBN 3-548-36518-3 .
Horst Schröder: ambiguous molting. In: Comixene . No. 25, 1979, ISSN 0174-2205 , p. 44 ff.