http://www.theguardian.com/books/gallery/2012/may/30/terrifying-french-childrens-books-in-pictures
Room on the Broom is probably my favourite, although I love the Squash and a Squeeze song which has a bit of a reggae feel to it.
Room on the Broom and The Gruffalo are still around somewhere, they wouldn't let either go. I love the Axel Scheffler illustrations too.
we signed up to the children's book club at school and so every couple of months the girls receive a French book each. So far I've been amused by how many loup (wolves) are in the stories and how many pairs of knickers (culottes) both of which the girls find hilarious. I have noticed the images are quite dull though compared to the bright glittery UK books I am used to. I love the Julia Donaldson books in the UK and can highly recommend those to anyone who has not yet tried them out for their kids or Grandkids. The audio CD's are excellent too (so good that I hardly listen to anything else now in the car!)
I think it's just that things change very slowly in France and everything concerning children changes, if possible, at an even slower pace than the rest of things. When I was a child, we bought books over from England because, not only did we like them much better, but also there was hardly anything for children in France. My (French) dad spent ages reading our children's books, constantly remarking how much better they were than anything available in France. So taking into account the fact that children's literature is more or less at the beginner stage, I suppose we should expect something Victorian in France.... Threatening and depicting evils to come is a very French type of behaviour, and one of those I simply can't adapt to, it baffles me. It doesn't work, but people still take pride in scaring the sh** out of children and even university students whenever they can. Power issues???
Incidentally, Russia is worse.... if that's any consolation
I have the complete Grimm collection in their original language and they are folk tales that were, given the use of language, for adults in the main. I think the world made them into scary 'fairy tales' with translation and lost the metaphors in folk traditions. I see your point though, however we are now in the 21st century and still they have not woken up to the fact that horror film watching young people are no longer that easy to scare. It is the mind of the writers and illustrators I fail to comprehend.
I worked as a children's librarian for many years and have always found French children's books to follow the Grimm tales tradition of using stories to frighten children into behaving. So far as I have ever seen, the French do not view children as innocents but as wild animals to be tamed. They do not understand play that is not instructive. (An acquaintance who wrote textbooks for Nathan was told not to try to make anything "fun".)
The few really wonderful teachers I met who tried to go in the opposite direction were soon hounded out of their jobs. You can find them in French schools around the world, but rarely in France.
Just the 'implications' in this cover design when the world is waking up to the extent of child abuse is bizarre at best. The other covers are equally bizarre by degrees and seeing there is one of them among our daughters' books I had a dekko and the content is as, if not scarier than the cover (clown with surgeon's mask, then gross incompetence comes up quickly, etc). Oh well, nice balanced generation of children to be expected to grow up without the horrors... err?