Class Consciousness and Working-Class Voices

While BD's album format and pricing often positioned it as middle-class entertainment, working-class creators have used the medium to explore class experience with sophistication rivaling any sociological study. This tradition connects to BD's origins in popular culture while pushing against its bourgeois aspirations.

Baru (Hervé Barulea) stands as perhaps the most significant working-class voice in contemporary BD. His works like "Quéquette Blues" and "Les Années Spoutnik" present working-class life with unsentimental honesty, showing both solidarity and conflict within communities. Baru's rough, expressionist style mirrors his content, rejecting polished aesthetics for raw emotional impact.

Étienne Davodeau's documentary BD explores contemporary labor issues through immersive reporting. "Les Mauvaises Gens" (The Bad People) traces his parents' involvement in labor organizing, while "Un homme est mort" (A Man Is Dead) reconstructs a 1950 strike that turned violent. These works use BD's capacity for historical reconstruction to preserve working-class history often excluded from official narratives.

Contemporary creators continue exploring class through various approaches. Some focus on industrial transformation's human costs, others on service-sector precarity. The rise of autobiographical BD has enabled working-class creators to document their experiences directly, challenging middle-class assumptions about "universal" experiences.