Teens are portrayed as false rebels primarily concerned with appearance and seduction, while adults are often retarded hippies who want to keep their illusion of freedom of mind while leading a cramped life.
[4] Pierre Bourdieu qualifies "Agrippine" as "a rigorous, almost ethnographic […] evocation" of the Parisian intellectual bourgeoisie, grasped in all its aspects: bodily postures, language, concerns (such as the parents' obsession with academic success).
[5] This documentary aspect does not prevent Bretécher from creating "deeply universal" adolescent characters,[5] mocking at the youthism of adults and a skepticism tinged with indifference in the face of their contradictory injunctions.
This social criticism is in line with the Frustrés (1973-1981), of which Agrippine appears "in a way the bastard girl […], as superficial and selfish as her activist parents wanted to be committed and determined to changing society".
[3] In Agrippine, the author continues to catalog the tics of language of her contemporaries, while going "well beyond the caricature[3] In fact, she stages French through a contemporary French slang not only restored but also largely invented, for example when she extrapolates adolescent language tics ("poorly digested anglicisms, verlan and elliptical constructions, abbreviations and deformations[3] or that she invites various terms to evoke the complexity of family ties in the age of divorces ("faux-demi", "double-demi", "demi-doubles).