Chloé Cruchaudet’s Mauvais genre (Wrong Gender) is one of those rare works that straddle the line between history and imagination, between fact and artistic freedom, between love and destruction. It tells the real-life story of Paul and Louise Grappe, an ordinary Parisian couple whose lives were turned upside down by the First World War. What begins as a tale of survival gradually transforms into an exploration of gender, sexuality, and identity, culminating in tragedy. Cruchaudet’s masterful blend of documentary and invention turns this strange episode of French history into a deeply human and unsettling story that lingers long after the final page.
At its heart, Mauvais genre is the story of a deserter and his wife. Paul Grappe, a working-class man from Paris, is called up to fight in the Great War. At first he sees it as an adventure, but the horrors of the trenches quickly destroy his illusions. Cruchaudet’s depiction of the war is brief but unforgettable. Rendered in shades of green and black, the battlefield is a place of mud, madness, and mutilation. In one of the most haunting scenes, Paul’s friend Marcel is decapitated, and the hallucination of his talking corpse follows Paul even after he escapes the front. In a desperate bid to avoid returning to the killing fields, Paul mutilates himself by cutting off a finger. But the authorities are not fooled, and rather than being discharged, he is ordered back to the front. Instead, he deserts.
From that moment, Paul’s life is reduced to hiding in the small Paris apartment he shares with his devoted wife Louise. The confinement becomes unbearable. One night, in a moment of rebellion and boredom, Paul puts on Louise’s clothes to sneak out for a bottle of wine. The disguise works. Not only does no one recognize him, but he also feels strangely liberated. The incident plants a dangerous idea: perhaps he can live as a woman. For Louise, the plan is a way to protect her husband from being caught and executed. For Paul, it becomes something else entirely, a passage into another self. With Louise’s help, he refines his female persona. She teaches him how to walk, how to speak, how to flirt. And so Suzanne Landgard is born.
But Suzanne’s liberation is not innocent. Cruchaudet takes the reader into the nocturnal world of the Bois de Boulogne, where Suzanne discovers a community of sexual outsiders, prostitutes, crossdressers, gay men, and curious bourgeois looking for illicit thrills. Here, gender dissolves and desire multiplies. Paul, as Suzanne, becomes both performer and participant in this hidden carnival of freedom. The Bois is drawn in swirling, dreamlike lines, part comedy, part nightmare. When Louise finally follows her husband into this underworld, she too is seduced by its strange allure. Their love, once based on loyalty and sacrifice, turns into complicity and despair. They live in a fragile balance between affection and repulsion, each knowing that the other has changed beyond recognition.
When the government finally declares an amnesty for deserters in 1925, Paul sheds his female identity and reclaims his name. But normal life no longer fits him. Suzanne has become more than a disguise, she has become a part of his soul. Paul’s return to masculinity brings not relief but anger, alcoholism, and violence. Louise, who endured everything for him, finds herself trapped once more in the role of the suffering wife. The war that shattered Paul’s body has now destroyed their marriage. The story ends with Louise shooting Paul dead, a desperate act that a sympathetic court later judges as self-defense. She is acquitted, though one senses that her punishment will last forever.
Although based on a historical case documented by historians Fabrice Virgili and Danièle Voldman in La Garçonne et l’Assassin, Mauvais genre is not a faithful reconstruction. Cruchaudet uses the facts as scaffolding for a work of psychological fiction. She is less interested in what exactly happened than in what it might have felt like. Her Paul and Louise are not symbols or heroes; they are flawed, contradictory, and painfully human. Their descent into deception and violence mirrors the trauma of an entire generation scarred by war and by the collapse of old certainties about gender, morality, and society.
The book’s success in France, crowned by the Prix du Public at Angoulême and the Prix ABCD, reflects a broader fascination with those who defy convention. In contrast to patriotic tales of heroism, Cruchaudet’s story celebrates the deserter, the deviant, the queer survivor. It suggests that the real casualty of war is not just life but identity itself. In showing how the boundaries between man and woman, loyalty and betrayal, love and cruelty dissolve, Mauvais genre captures the spirit of the 1920s, an age intoxicated by freedom and haunted by the past.
Chloé Cruchaudet had already explored questions of identity in earlier works such as Groënland-Manhattan and Ida, but in Mauvais genre her art and storytelling reach a new level of maturity. She transforms an obscure tragedy into a modern meditation on gender and trauma, a story that feels both timeless and disturbingly current. Beneath its period costumes and smoky Parisian settings lies a question that still resonates today: how far can a person go in reinventing themselves before they become someone else entirely?
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