This project examines the early history of French comics (bande dessinée) through the case of the Frères Offenstadt, Jewish publishers whose illustrated children's periodicals were among the first of their kind to reach a mass audience in the first decade of the twentieth century. The commercial success of the Offenstadt publishing house provoked antisemitic press campaigns, legal prosecutions, and sustained accusations of obscenity, sexual perversion, and cultural degeneration. I argue that this controversy constituted a moral panic in response to new media, in which antisemitic ideology framed the publishers' German Jewish origin and their publications as evidence of foreign subterfuge and cultural degeneracy. Using both legal and published evidence, the paper demonstrates how Jewishness became entangled in debates over mass culture, youth, and French national identity, and how antisemitism helped shape the boundaries of legitimacy for a new medium of mass visual culture.

Andrew Kotick (Ph.D., CUNY) is a lecturer in the Department of History at Penn State.