One would not have thought it ideal material for a comic book. In three months in 1994, 800,000 people were killed in Rwanda as extremist Hutus tried to eliminate the minority Tutsi population. That genocide is now the subject of a book by a French cartoonist which has been hailed as resembling a Shakespearean tragedy.

Déogratias by Jean-Philippe Stassen, published in Paris this week, is an 80-page comic book dramatising the ethnic tension which led to the Rwandan genocide.

"The book is inspired by anger," Stassen said.

At the outset Hutus and Tutsis are living peacefully together. Déogratias, the boy hero, is a Hutu and is in love with Bégnigne, a Tutsi. As the massacres take place and his Tutsi schoolmates are killed, Déogratias does nothing except drink to forget what is going on around him. As he does so, he mutates into a dog, symbolising his cowardliness and disappearing humanity.

Stassen indicts not only Hutus but the Catholic church, for cynicism during the genocide, and the colonial powers, for creating the tribal strife in the first place.

"Hutu, Tutsi - it's the whites who invented the differences between us," a disgusted Rwandan soldier tells Déogratias at one point. "They wrote those words on our identity cards. They came and sowed the seeds of division."

Reviewing Déogratias in Le Monde, Yves-Marie Labé called it "a story both distancing and moving, like a Shakespearean tragedy".

Such comic books, known in France as bandes dessinées , or BDs, are regularly used to explore serious themes. Last week saw the publication of L'Enqu te Corse, by René Pétillon, an adventure story in which the detective hero, Jack Palmer, becomes embroiled in a topical debate about Corsican nationalism as police and activists trade bombs and bullets.

Meanwhile the publisher Delcourt has produced two extremely abridged, though colourful, cartoon versions of Marcel Proust's seven-volume novel, Á La Recherche du Temps Perdu.

Surveys show that 41% of the population regularly buy and read BDs.