Beauty & the Blond Beast: A Grimm Racial Fairy Tale For Our Times

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There has been a lot of angry ink spilled over Disney’s new racial reimagining of Snow White as No White this past week. The classic fairy tale heroine with “skin as white as snow” has been recast in the studio’s latest deliberately unwatchable movie as an angry Marxist mestizo who earned her soubriquet from being born in a severe snowstorm instead.

Coincidentally, an eerily similar racially tinged cautionary fable has also just emerged from France, where 800,000 copies of a new illustrated children’s edition of another fairy-tale classic, Beauty and the Beast, have just had their printing cancelled by the French Government due to what officials called the book’s “inappropriate” nature, the very day before presses were set to roll.

A free copy was due to be issued to all France’s eleven-year-olds, under an annual State-funded program, ‘A Book For the Summer’. Over the long summer break, students are instructed to gain a taste for independent reading by making their way through a major work of European literature, jazzed up by colorful contemporary cartoon illustrations. Unfortunately, the artist chosen to illustrate the book for 2025 was Julien Berjeaut, famous to the nation as the popular cartoonist ‘Jul’, and the only man on the planet to have thought Disney’s new Snow Brown deserved a five-star rating.

La Belle et la Bête Noir  

Unlike in the original 18th-century version of the manuscript, in Jul’s 2025 desecration Beauty is not white, but has magically become a tanned Muslim, and not even a taharrush gamea-able one like Princess Jasmine in Disney’s 1992 version of Aladdin. Instead, beauty being very much in the eye of the beholder, Belle is now a gawky-looking unproddable with giant, hairy black caterpillar eyebrows, resembling some unholy cross between Frieda Kahlo and a werewolf in drag. Examining Jul’s deliberately anachronistic sketches of her taking selfies with Beast, a big black Bigfoot from the ghetto, one is almost prompted to ask which is which.

Belle’s father is an Algerian immigrant who makes a living from smuggling unspecified items of contraband into the country, and in Jul’s illustrations he is shown being persecuted by the evil French police and their vicious sniffer-dogs at customs, racist, anti-immigrant scum that they are: Jul is well-known for causing controversy with self-made anti-cop T-shirts. Oddly for a good Muslim, for whom such things are meant to be haram, Jul also depicts Beauty’s father swigging wine and singing before passing out upon a bed. Maybe bootleg alcohol is what he has secretly been smuggling, rather than people, drugs, explosives and items of semi-automatic weaponry, as may have been expected?

Beauty’s two cruel older sisters, meanwhile, are depicted very much as houris of easy virtue, applying lipstick in front of mirrors prior to a night out on the pull, dressing very much not in burkas.

So, you can perhaps see why the French Department of Education ultimately deemed the new book “inappropriate” for eleven-year-olds. Jul decided to play at being the victim of ‘bigotry’ in this decision, however, claiming the cancellation was “the biggest case of censorship ever seen in French publishing”, indicating he has perhaps never heard of the Marquis de Sade.

Jul’s kneejerk ‘explanation’ for his sudden last-minute cancellation was this:

For me, the only explanation lies in their disgust at my portrayal of princes and princesses who look a bit more like modern-day schoolchildren and can dress up in tracksuits … Or has the presence of curly-haired, swarthy-skinned characters rather than blonde fairy-tale princesses become unbearable for the national education system?

In another statement, Jul went even further: “Could the ‘Great Replacement’ of blonde princesses by young Mediterranean girls [i.e., North African Muslims] be the limit that the Ministry’s … administration must not cross?” France, as many of you will know, is where the very term “great replacement” was first coined, by the immigration-skeptical writer Renaud Camus, and Jul was implying that, by abandoning his new, Islamified Beauty and the Beast, the French government was cravenly pandering to domestic, neo-Vichy believers in what left-wingers like him habitually dismiss as being a mere ‘right-wing conspiracy theory’.

Yet the real truth is likely to be the precise reverse, for reasons that shall ultimately become clear. After all, given Jul’s previous track record in such things, there is absolutely no way the Ministry would not have known precisely what kind of woke, race-reversed agitprop they were certain to end up getting from the man.

Jul et Jim Crow

Jul is a talented cartoonist, in the sense that he can certainly draw. But, simultaneously, he is a talentless hack, because all he can draw is propaganda. Described on his French Wikipedia page as “the son of unionized and left-wing teachers”, he publishes in left-wing journals like L’Humanité, the newspaper of the French Communist Party, and appears every bit as committed towards the practice of imposing leftist pedagogy upon impressionable children as his parents were.

In 2016, Jul became the new illustrator of the long-running comic book album series Lucky Luke, Europe’s most popular such publication after Asterix and Tintin. Concerning the adventures of a heroic Wild West gunslinger who can draw his gun much more accurately than Jul can draw white people, in 1983 the series was already being bowdlerized to remove Luke’s characteristic cigarette hanging stuck from his bottom lip, artists replacing it with a harmless blade of grass instead. Jul probably plans one day soon to Great Replace it a second time, with a hookah.

When Jul inherited the series, his first thought was not “What entertaining new adventures can I come up with?” but to ask where all the Jews and blacks in the comics were, and “why these two fundamental identities had been wiped off” the series’ pages. Accordingly, Jul’s first reimagined Lucky Luke story was The Promised Land, in which the cowboy escorts a Polish Orthodox Jewish family to safety in America. I thought the Promised Land was meant to be Israel?

Worse was his 2020 effort, A Cowboy in High Cotton, published in the wake of the death of the notorious black outlaw George Floyd across the Atlantic. In a laudatory NYT profile, Jul explained he wanted his latest comic to catch kids whilst still young enough to be easily indoctrinated, with a story read in pre-pubescence one which “enters the mind like a hammer blow and never comes out.”

Jul wished his album to stand as “the antidote” to the famously controversial 1931 Tintin book Tintin in the [Belgian] Congo, in which native black Africans are crudely caricatured as comically inept and braindead children in dire need of benign white colonial control, whose command of the French language is even worse than that of Tintin’s faithful white-furred canine companion Snowy (soon to be replaced by a chihuahua in the forthcoming 2026 Disney adaptation).

It is true Hergé’s 1931 book is indeed biased racial propaganda; but so is Jul’s 2020 book, just biased in the other way, to make all black people look like unrealistic flawless saints, and all white people look like evil, homicidal maniacs. Right-wing French magazine Valeurs Actuelles complained the new comic’s white characters – mostly KKK men – were universally depicted as “grotesquely ugly” and filled with “crass stupidity and nastiness”.

Jul introduced a new hero, Bass Reeves, a real-life Wild West black deputy US Marshal and former slave, envisaged as “a strong black character” who would take over Lucky Luke’s traditional ‘white savior syndrome’ responsibility of saving the day, and educate children about the mere fake Hollywood “legend of the blond, blue-eyed cowboy”. At the end, after finally defeating the Klan, the comic ends with Bass transforming into MLK a century too early: “I have a dream, Luke. I have a dream that one day Blacks [sic] will be treated as the equal of other Americans.” Why is Jul treating them as being more equal than white people, then?

La Règle du Jew

As Unlucky Luke’s transformation into a racial propaganda figure caused as big a furor in France as Disney’s current brownwashing of Snow Shite has done in America, it is simply impossible the Ministry of Education would not have known what Jul was likely to do to Beauty and the Beast. Indeed, they clearly initially approved of his race-swapping efforts, as the French Education Minister wrote a glowing preface to the book, praising his drawings. So why the sudden change of mind?

The Ministry’s statement explained it was due to “the degree of irony used, which is difficult to understand for students aged 10 to 11.” More specifically,

The illustrations proposed addressed themes that are not suitable for students of this age, such as alcohol, social networks or complex social realities (counterfeit trafficking, police checks), which could have raised questions among the students without necessarily finding an appropriate answer due to the lack of pedagogical support during the summer holidays.

Now, I can’t read any French, but I can read fluent Newspeak. Translated, I think this might mean the Ministry was not truly concerned about the drink and sex references, as may superficially be concluded, but that puzzled white children would look at scenes like Belle’s Algerian father being detained at customs and ask their parents why he was being searched. At this point, lacking “pedagogical support during the summer holidays” from any pre-vetted lefty teachers like Jul’s parents, the kids may have gone away “without necessarily finding an appropriate answer” as many of their unreconstructed, National Rally-voting parents will have replied “Because he’s a typical criminal Muslim illegal immigrant, dear, like most of them are these days, Le Pen for President!”

As Education Minster Elisabeth Borne told French media:

It’s a modern rewrite. We have a father who arrives from Algeria, who has to commit fraud [due to ‘poverty’, I suppose], who is checked by the police. Perhaps in a setting with teachers, we can explain this irony. [i.e., that Jul means it as an illustration of supposed ‘police brutality’, not endemic Muslim criminality] But it’s a book that’s meant to be read on holiday, with the family.

Reading between the lines, only at the last moment did the Ministry realize Jul’s facile intended ‘anti-racist’ and anti-cop message could actually be interpreted by more independent minds in the precise reverse way he intended it to be, thereby necessitating its abrupt cancellation!

Still, never mind. The bureaucrats had a contingency fallback plan already in place: to re-issue the 2023 summer reading text instead, an innovative, feminist-focused version of Homer. A book telling the tragic and violent aftermath of a white Western woman being lured into a forced marriage with a strange foreign gentleman from Turkey? Surely no politically incorrect wrongthink interpretations of that particular tale could ever occur …

If readers wish to see some of Jul’s illustrations for themselves, several are reproduced online here.