Peanuts in French

A crossword clue — three letters, “Parisian’s ‘Rats!’” — made me wonder what Charlie Brown says in French. And now I know.

A New York Times article from 1975, “Peanuts Bridges a Language Gap and Captivates the French” gave me an initial answer:

Zut et grands dieux! — Rats and good grief!

They said it would never happen here, but a million French are now hooked on Peanuts, the comic strip by Charles Schulz with the water‐headed beagle Snoopy, the lifetime loser Charlie Brown and the horrible Lucy, all speaking the Gallic tongue here.

But I wanted better evidence. I found some in Google Books, in strips collected in two volumes of Snoopy et le petit monde de “Peanuts” (2014, 2015). Behold:

  [Peanuts, November 11, 1973; September 10, 1978. Click either image for a larger view.]

And here are the originals, from the GoComics Peanuts page, which has the strip’s complete run available for browsing:

  [Peanuts, November 11, 1973; September 10, 1978. Click either image for a larger view.]

Just as in the crossword, the exclamation “Zut!” is the French equivalent of “Rats!” I could not find panels with “Grands dieux!” [Great gods!], but Snippet View makes enough of Peanuts visible to confirm that “Grands dieux!” is (or was) indeed the French equivalent of “Good grief!”

Related reading
All OCA Peanuts posts (Pinboard)