Chloé Cruchaudet - Degenerado

2014, Chloé Cruchaudet, Spanish,

"Degenerado" (Degenerate) is the Spanish language version of "Mauvais genre" (Wrong Gender) by Chloé Cruchaudet.

Degenerado, the Spanish edition of Mauvais genre by Chloé Cruchaudet, stands as one of the most audacious and haunting graphic novels of the last decade. Based on true events, the book reconstructs the tragic and extraordinary story of Paul Grappe and Louise Landy, a working-class couple from Paris whose love, passion, and despair unfolded in the turbulent years surrounding the First World War. The novel begins as a love story: Paul and Louise meet, fall in love, and marry with youthful optimism. Yet when war breaks out, the brutal reality of the trenches shatters their lives. Paul, desperate to escape the nightmare of violence and filth, deserts the army and returns to Paris to reunite with Louise. Their reunion is tender but shadowed by danger. As a deserter, Paul must hide, and the couple’s life becomes one of claustrophobic secrecy, confined to a small hotel room where fear and monotony threaten to destroy their bond.

 

From this claustrophobic setting emerges the novel’s central transformation. One evening, Paul, longing for freedom and a taste of normal life, puts on one of Louise’s dresses to go out for wine. What begins as a disguise soon becomes a revelation. In his new identity as Suzanne, Paul discovers not only safety but also a strange liberation. Louise, initially amused and supportive, helps him refine his appearance and mannerisms. What starts as play becomes a way of life. Suzanne soon ventures into the world, finding work alongside Louise in a textile factory, where she becomes a source of curiosity and fascination. Cruchaudet portrays these scenes with delicate irony, capturing the humor and tenderness of a couple learning to navigate a reality that defies every social expectation. Through Suzanne’s eyes, Paul experiences the world anew, noticing how women move, talk, and endure constant scrutiny. The reader senses both his fascination and discomfort, as his performance of femininity blurs into genuine identification.

 

The Paris of the 1920s that Cruchaudet depicts is alive with contrasts: the liberating joy of postwar nightlife, the trauma of returning soldiers, and the shifting boundaries of gender and desire. Suzanne, emboldened by her new persona, begins to frequent the Bois de Boulogne, a nocturnal world of freedom and sensuality where conventions dissolve and identities intermingle. There, Cruchaudet’s art becomes hallucinatory and poetic, her lines fluid and her palette reduced to smoky grays punctuated by flashes of red and violet. The color red, used sparingly, becomes a symbol of life, passion, and danger, following Suzanne like a pulse through her metamorphosis. Yet as Paul’s alter ego takes on a life of its own, his relationship with Louise deteriorates. What once united them now divides them. Louise, who had once guided her husband through the feminine rituals of dress and gesture, finds herself increasingly alienated by his indulgence in a world of promiscuity and exhibition. Suzanne is celebrated in the Bois, admired and desired, while Louise is left with the ghost of the man she once loved.

In 1925, an amnesty is declared for French deserters, and Paul can finally return to his former identity. But after years of living as Suzanne, he no longer knows who Paul is. The return to “normality” feels like a punishment rather than a redemption. He grows bitter, violent, and unstable. His drinking worsens, and his fame as the “man who lived as a woman” attracts attention that humiliates them both. Their story ends in tragedy when Louise, pushed beyond endurance, kills him. In court, she is portrayed as a victim of domestic abuse, and the jury acquits her, moved by pity and perhaps by discomfort at the unsettling nature of her husband’s life. The moral ambiguity of the story is part of its strength. Cruchaudet refuses to romanticize or condemn her characters. She portrays Paul neither as hero nor villain, but as a man broken by war and trapped in a society unable to comprehend the complexity of identity and desire.

 

The real-life story of Paul Grappe and Louise Landy had been documented by French historians Danièle Voldman and Fabrice Virgili in La Garçonne et l’Assassin, but Cruchaudet transforms their study into something far richer and more imaginative. Through her art, she captures not only historical accuracy but also emotional truth. The fluidity of her drawings, unconfined by traditional comic frames, mirrors the instability of the characters’ identities. Her minimalist use of color heightens the intensity of emotion while her fine ink lines bring texture and movement to every scene. The reader is swept through shifting tones: from the grotesque horror of the trenches to the dreamlike eroticism of Parisian nights, from moments of humor to those of crushing despair. Every page feels alive with contradiction, much like the city and the era it depicts.

 

Degenerado is also a meditation on the violence that societies inflict on bodies and identities. The war destroys Paul’s sense of masculinity, and his transformation into Suzanne can be read both as an act of survival and as a psychological response to trauma. Yet Cruchaudet never turns the story into a manifesto. Her approach is compassionate but unsentimental. She neither ridicules nor glorifies Paul’s fluidity; instead, she presents it as a human condition shaped by fear, longing, and circumstance. The same delicate balance applies to Louise, who embodies both devotion and resentment, love and revulsion. Their relationship, at once erotic and destructive, becomes a metaphor for a generation scarred by war and modernity.

 

When Mauvais genre was first published in France, it became an unexpected literary sensation. It sold over fifty thousand copies in just six months and won multiple awards, including the Prix du Public at the Angoulême Festival in 2014, the Grand Prix de la Critique/ACBD, the Prix Landerneau, and the Coup de Cœur Prize at the Festival Quai des Bulles. Critics praised Cruchaudet for her courage in tackling such a controversial story with intelligence and sensitivity. The Spanish edition, Degenerado, retains the same haunting beauty, reminding readers that love, identity, and morality are never fixed, but fragile constructions tested by history and emotion. It is not just a tale about gender or war; it is about the way people invent themselves when the world collapses around them, and about how the masks we wear can sometimes reveal more truth than the faces beneath.

Available via Amazon

www.tcj.com and greatwarfiction.wordpress