Sixty-eight people on the decline, bourgeois-bohemian, middle managers or even emancipated women, exchange their ideas on short black and white stories and allow the author to express various thoughts on society.
The topics covered are very varied: educational methods and problems, conflict between generations, women's emancipation, married life and its crises, decadence of society, politics, etc.
The following year, she produced pages for the Actualité , a series of often humorous short stories in which the newspaper's team commented on the present weather, a work that she did not appreciate very much.
Earning its author the qualification in 1976 of "best sociologist of the year" by Roland Barthes,[5] his Frustrés page is, according to Jean Daniel, "in depth, and in the second degree, one of the most effectively politicized chronicles of our weekly"[6] According to Florence Montreynaud, the "conformists of anti-conformism" of whom the Frustrés de Brétecher portray "are also the readers of the" Nouvel Observateur "", namely "the snobs, the sons of bourgeois lefties, soft, hard, sexists, feminists, lax parents and their ugly jojos ”Bretécher makes the language of his characters the best way to turn them into "social archetypes.
[8] In the tradition of Jules Feiffer, one of his main inspiration, Bretécher generally uses in the Frustrés an extremely regular arrangement of boxes (Gaufrier) and drawings which are repeated a lot (Itération iconique) which allows better highlight the rare variations of the characters' postures and thus maximize the humorous effect carried by the text[9]