For 15 years, sociologist Patrice Corriveau and historians André Cellard and Isabelle Perreault have been mapping suicide in Quebec across 250 years. Their corpus: 18,000 cases from coroner’s archives, including more than 1,000 farewell letters. A collection unlike any other in the world.
How do you bring that kind of research to a general audience without losing either its rigour or its humanity? These archives tell stories that statistics alone can’t capture. Marie, a young woman at the turn of the 20th century, took her own life. Her farewell letters tell the real story: she was pregnant and unmarried. In that era, that meant social ruin.
To give voice to these testimonies, the team joined forces with illustrator Christian Quesnel to create a graphic novel: Vous avez détruit la beauté du monde: Le suicide scénarisé au Québec depuis 1763.
This format makes it possible to depict sensitive scenarios honeslty, without exploitation. Photographs would have been too raw. Academic articles would have been too technical and reached too few. It also gave the researchers place themselves within the narrative — sharing their doubts, their ethical debates, their methodological choices — pulling back the curtain on research work that usually remains out of sight.
Widely acclaimed in artistic and scientific circles, as well as with the general public. Vous avez détruit la beauté du monde demonstrates that research must find new paths — and go to meet its audience where it already is.
