The raft of the jellyfish. A huge painting (almost 5 x 7 m) that can be discovered by visiting the Louvre Museum in Paris. It shows shipwrecked people in a pitiful state on a raft at the water's edge. That's about all I knew about this subject when I discovered a comic strip entitled "The Shipwrecked of the Medusa".
In this book, the authors recount the tragedy of these shipwrecked people after their frigate, the Medusa, ran aground off the coast of Africa in 1816. We discover that it was a navigational error due to the vanity of a captain who was not really in his place. More than a hundred people will die as a result of this man's bad decisions. Indeed, out of the 147 who will embark on the raft, only 15 will be recovered after having endured hunger, dehydration, madness and even anthropophagy.
The interest of the comic strip is to parallel the shipwreck, the difficulty for the painter Géricault to collect information on this story and to put it in painting. In fact, the painting was done only 10 years after the shipwreck and the event turned into a scandal in which the captain was even held responsible for the disaster.
Entirely done in watercolour, this story presents the society of the time with the still strong presence of the monarchists. It also shows how the command of a ship can be entrusted to a person without competence, solely on the basis of his birth. The story is also widely documented, which gives it even more weight.
Les Naufragés de la Méduse is both a comic book that tells a story, but which can also be used as a basis for discovering what really happened on this cursed raft.
The Shipwrecked of the Medusa - Jean-Sébastien Bordas and Jean-Christophe Deveney
- Casterman Publishing
- 21.6 x 28.8 cm
- 176 pages
- 26.00 euros
