Mauvais Garçons : Portraits de Tatoués (1890‑1930) — Jérôme Pierrat & Éric Guillon

I found this book and knew it belonged in our collection of alter‑histories before even turning the first page. Mauvais Garçons is not merely a photo‑book—it is a visual dossier of the marginalized, the branded, the marked. Between 1890 and 1930, in France, thousands of tattoos became more than body‑decoration. They became codes, scars, statements—in the prisons, in the penal battalions of North Africa, in the criminal underworld.

This bilingual edition (French/English) by Pierrat and Guillon places over 175 dramatic photographs into a curatorial schema: tattoos as signage, tattoos as voice, tattoos as defiance.  The subjects—the “bad boys”, the outlaws—stand stripped of façade, their torsos a theatre of symbols. The book decodes those signs: wild animals, erotic drawings, mottos such as tout me fait rire (“everything makes me laugh”) scrawled across a chest.

Within our Subculture and Underworld shelf, this volume sits at the intersection of body archive, counter‑history and visual defiance. It invites the reader to examine how tattooing—once dismissed—became a language of resistance and identity. Darwin owns this because it speaks the dialect of the edge, in monochrome clarity.

Technical Sheet

• Object: Book
• Title: Mauvais Garçons : Portraits de Tatoués (1890‑1930)
• Authors: Jérôme Pierrat & Éric Guillon
• Date: 2013 (approx.)  
• Technique / Printing Method: Offset printing
• Medium / Materials: Hardcover (bilingual edition)
• Edition: First edition by La Manufacture de Livres
• Dimensions: 
• Language: French / English bilingual
• Pages: ~178 pages  
• Publisher / Editor: La Manufacture de Livres, France  
• ISBN: 978‑2358870566  
• Condition: new 
• Provenance: Darwin Collection