Popularized under the pseudonym L'Odieux Connard, Julien Hervieux claims the slogan «Qu'il est bon d'être mauvais!» ("It's good to be bad!"). In his new book, he dismantles with relish the greatest villains of all time.
Fiction, like history, loves heroes. And yet, nothing adds as much depth to a story as a good villain. What would Batman be without the Joker? Luke Skywalker without Darth Vader? Clarice Starling without Hannibal Lecter? It's these great villains who really add salt to the story and drive the narrative forward. And fiction has been quick to seize on these characters, with an increasing number of films and series on their origins, trying to explain how an innocent child became, one day, a horrible psychopath.
In real life, too, villains abound. They even now have their own primer listing the biggest bastards of the last two millennia, thanks to the A jubilant dictionary of history's villains, published by Harper Collins. The author, Julien Hervieux, has once again teamed up with the cartoonist Monsieur le Chien, with whom he had previously collaborated on Small theater of operations, by publishing comic strips dedicated to the two world wars.
Throughout these 250 pages, you'll find the great figures of history: Hitler, Stalin and Genghis Khan alone caused millions of deaths. There are also pyromaniac emperors, bloodthirsty generals and sadistic princesses. There are also personalities less well known to the general public, who killed on a much smaller scale. Marcel Petiot, a small, trouble-free doctor, turned out to be a serial killer who burned her victims in the cellar of her Paris mansion. Englishwoman Mary Ann Cotton poisoned three husbands, her mother and a dozen of her children.
A gallery of hilarious portraits
This book is a portrait of criminals great and small. Men and women, some of whom showed homicidal or torturous tendencies from childhood. They may have acted out of sheer greed, lust for power, selfishness, boredom or ideology. While fiction has often portrayed them as cruel and detestable characters, reality was far worse.
Julien Hervieux is a former history teacher. He knows his stuff and offers facts that are, as far as possible, backed up by research. As the author of a YouTube channel, he also understands the importance of not talking too seriously about history, if you want to attract customers. So, as always with Hervieux, the tone is laced with dark humor and irreverence. It often hits the nail on the head. It's a laugh-out-loud read, even if the impertinence sometimes goes a little too far.
But it still leaves you with a certain unease. There's one constant in all these portraits, and it's chilling. It shows just how inventive human beings can be when it comes to inflicting pain on, or even simply eliminating, their fellow man. This has been going on for a long time, if the characters featured in this dictionary are anything to go by. And it's not likely to stop any time soon.
Write to the author: sandrine.rovere@leregardlibre.com
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Julien Hervieux, Monsieur le Chien
A jubilant dictionary of history's villains
Harper Collins
October 2024
252 pages
French 
German 
English