For the empire, I live, I die, I still live…
Nothing could be simpler than beginning this narrative with an unresolved thirst for power. Battles, bloodshed, women with their heads bowed and blows with swords, this is the daily life of the infernal squad of Glorim, the man in whom the emperor sees his most faithful henchman. One day, the emperor of this uchronic ancient Rome asks his bravest warriors to conquer the new world. That is, to venture beyond known borders, where everything is disorder and ugliness, in order to subdue inferior foreign nations. The quest of Glorim and his gang is however an existential and material dead end: this journey is the one that will kill the values and beliefs of the empire, this paper tiger. Like Don Quixote, his deceived men crash against silence and boredom: there is nothing beyond the empire, except a confrontation with its own finitude…
The complete "Pour l'empire", an epic comic book by Vivès and Merwan (both writers and cartoonists) was released on September 11 by Dargaud! This collaboration marks the birth of an implacable fight against the wandering and despair of man in the face of the inanity of human life.
Rome, to whom comes thy arm to tear my companions!
Reckless heroes are what the reader likes. When we were in class, antiquity is the chapter that captivated us with the dark passions it raised. Conquests, fortune, glory, power. The tragic fates, falls and climbs of some provoked the admiration of us schoolchildren. Indeed, we vow the lukewarm. Even the founding poets of humanist literature like Boccaccio liked to relate historical or mythological facts tinged with bravery (the De casibus virorum illustrium of 1373, for example). This fascination of the French for the violence and passions of the ancestors is a very Latin peculiarity that has a name: the mos majorum. This is a belief moreover, more than a reality, since the mos majorum is a line of least resistance that suits the conservative impulses of some, which precisely the comic strip comes to mock here. It is a belief that requires us to think that ancestral values and traditions are far superior to ours and that in this they are to be opposed to our decadent times. This empire created from scratch by Vivès and Merwan takes up codes that we, viewers of historical series like Rome or Spartacus, know well. Thus the story begins with a bloody battle, a mass grave of war that reminds us of the maneuverability of a Titus Pullo to cut dead on probation (see the excellent series Rome, 2005). Between two killings, Glorim and his gang, whom we follow in the comic, praise a "cowardly" empire, where men kill each other and rape women, because the emperor asked them to. This empire, although made of marbling and gold, is based on a martial policy of killing one's neighbor to take possession of territories. The man in charge is the one who appears on the front cover. This is the emperor, very similar to the bust of Julius Caesar found in the Rhône in 2007. This brutality inherent in the imperial regime is a way for Vivès and Merwan to present to the reader the darkest aspects of power and to demonstrate the vain character of the characters: their ethos is built on Baudelaire 's fatal maxim in My heart laid bare: "There are only three respectable beings: The priest, the warrior, the poet. Know, kill, create. The other men are cutable and corvéable, made for the stable, that is to say, to exercise what are called professions". This is chaos in the emperor's empire of fools. Glorim and her companions have their nights to fill, and they have chosen to kill en masse.
A new antithetical world
As they set off, Glorim and his squad boldly set off on the most epic adventure of their lives. When they dive, the reader can only think of Immortan Joe's infernal army in Mad Max Fury Road (2015), which brings together young men in the prime of life ready to do anything to bring the loot back to the tyrant. "Oh, what a day… what a lovely day!" exclaims Nux, words he could wrest from the emperor's soldiers in the comic book under study. The reader begins to know the different men who compose it. Apart from Glorim, there are Statum, Forte, Calma, Virgil and Angox, seasoned killers ready to serve the emperor, but especially in a position of weakness in the face of this new world. Emaciated, cold and impossible to map, the squad gradually understands that the emperor has sent them to a dead end. Finally, the sterility of these unknown lands is only the analogon of the vain ambitions of the empire: this obsession with conquest is only a river of blood, an upside down of the imperial universe of Glorim. For example, a fantastic bestiary comes to life in the new world. Leviathans and miraculous creatures embroider a course similar to the Eclipse episode in Berserk (Kentaro Miura). The squad, populated by strong and virile men in the middle of the path of their lives, confesses its helplessness and forks. While the imperial laws command men to kill and submit, by sword or technique, to be masters and possessors of nature, Glorim sees under his feet any reason to blindly obey the emperor. In this learning, these dogs of war will seem pleasing to the reader, who will identify with their distress. But this underworld place bombarded with ghostly presences will one day lead to a new find: it is the second part of the story, the world of the Amazons. When Glorim's squad enters it, they are immediately moved by this short-petticoated phalanstery, but lack of luck for them, these beautiful and remarkable women know how to fight and put our men in rout. The episode of Virgil's, although very recreational, is also revealing of the carnivalesque process of this album: if at the beginning of the story it was the men who defiled women's bodies, it is now the opposite, the Amazons making the squad sex slaves, pure progenitors. We then understand where Vivès and Merwan want to go: relations between men and women can only work if the two sexes agree on common values. Here, it is the value of combat, since the squad becomes friends with one of the Amazons, formidable archer and formidable praying mantis. It is incorporated into the battalion. Glorim leaves the cycle of Amazons with one of their own, making his team of virile, and macho killers, a team of beings in search of truth in a new and increasingly threatening world.
The gods also die in the new world: against the empire
There everything is desolation. Glorim and his companions have changed their views since the beginning of their quest. They no longer serve the empire but renounce it. By conquering territories, they probe their origins. It is the episode of the discovery of a very sophisticated temple on the edge of nowhere, filled with maps, books and archives. The conclusion is clear: long before the empire, there were already much more advanced civilizations. This is where the problem lies: our men are forced to note that their empire is not a super-powerful nation.
