About Les Débrouillards

Les Débrouillards

Overview

Les Débrouillards is a French-language science magazine for young readers published in Montreal by Publications BLD. Aimed at children aged about nine to thirteen, it mixes illustrated science reporting with hands-on experiments, games and comics — in its own subscription pitch, "un savoureux alliage de science, de jeux et d'humour," a tasty blend of science, games and humour. It appears ten times a year in print, with two annual specials, Sport Débrouillards and DébrouillArts, available in an enhanced subscription tier. Les Débrouillards is the flagship of a small family of Quebec youth science magazines: Les Explorateurs serves younger readers of about five to ten, and Curium addresses teenagers. The magazine is also the best-known product of the wider Les Débrouillards educational movement, a network of science clubs and animators that began in Quebec and spread internationally. It is actively publishing: its online subscription platform is current, a Quebec government funding announcement of March 2025 supported the publisher's work through 2027, and the publisher's three titles remain on sale for the 2026 school year.

History

The magazine grew out of the Agence Science-Presse, a Montreal science news agency founded in November 1978 that sent a weekly bulletin, Hebdo Science, to Quebec media subscribers. The agency's director, Félix Maltais, added a youth science chronicle in the autumn of 1979, at first adapted from material produced by the Ontario Science Centre and signed by a mysterious "Professeur Scientifix." In January 1982 the chronicle became a publication in its own right, launched as Je me petit-débrouille, the journal of the Club des petits débrouillards. The surrounding educational movement — science clubs and school activities run with the loisir scientifique network, today Réseau Technoscience — dates its founding to 1981, and from 1984 the "petits débrouillards" idea spread abroad; France kept the original name, Les Petits Débrouillards, and sister movements took root in countries from Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco to Belgium, Germany, the Czech Republic and Mexico. In Quebec the clubs and associations kept a mission of initiating young people to science through experiments and animation activities offered to primary schools, municipal recreation services, libraries and childcare centres — a living network that still runs regional family science events, including a Débrouillards en famille edition scheduled at the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières in November 2026. The magazine took its present name, Les Débrouillards, in January 1992, and in the same period a television series of the same name aired on Radio-Canada, hosted by Marie-Soleil Tougas and Grégory Charles. In 1992 the French Bayard group joined the Agence Science-Presse and the Conseil de développement du loisir scientifique to create Publications BLD, the independent Montreal company that has published the magazine ever since; the Quebec government, in its 2025 funding release, dates Bayard Canada's joining of the two non-profit partners to 1994. Les Explorateurs followed in 2002, and Curium, for readers aged 14 to 17, was launched in September 2014. By November 2014, BLD marked the production of more than 500 magazines, including 342 issues of Les Débrouillards. In 2012, its thirtieth-anniversary year, Les Débrouillards shared the Quebec magazine association's Magazine of the Year award with the news magazine L'actualité.

Content and Coverage

Each issue is built around illustrated reports on nature, animals, technology, space, the human body, history and the future, written to be read independently by children at the upper-elementary and early-secondary level. Experiments readers can perform themselves are a signature feature, carrying on the founding idea that science is learned by doing; games, quizzes and puzzles reinforce the material. Comics are integral: the magazine's long-running strip, drawn for decades by Jacques Goldstyn, follows its young heroes through scientific adventures, and Goldstyn shared the 2000 Michael Smith Award for science promotion with founder Félix Maltais. The two annual specials extend the formula — Sport Débrouillards to science in sport and DébrouillArts to the arts — and the publisher has extended the brand into books, teaching tools and science-animation activities offered to schools, libraries and municipalities through the Débrouillards network. Book publishing grew up alongside the magazine from the start: collections built around the experiments that became the movement's trademark, and thematic series such as Les voyages fantastiques de Globulo, while the original Agence Science-Presse chronicle continued to be carried by Quebec media. The publisher's own description of the family stresses accompaniment "from kindergarten to the end of secondary school," with Les Débrouillards occupying the middle, 9-to-13 span.

Audience and Reach

The primary audience is francophone children aged nine to thirteen in Quebec — the publisher's subscription platform gives ages 9 to 13, while the Quebec government's 2025 release describes the title as serving 9-to-14-year-olds — together with the parents, teachers and librarians who buy it for them. No audited circulation figure for the magazine is published. The publisher's own historical claim, made in 2014, was that BLD's magazines together reached more than 350,000 young readers each month; that is the company's own figure from that date, not a current measurement. The title's institutional reach is documented in other ways: in 2023 Ubisoft Montréal and Publications BLD announced the donation of subscriptions to Curium, Les Débrouillards and Les Explorateurs for 275 elementary and 25 secondary school libraries serving disadvantaged communities across Quebec, and the magazine is carried digitally for libraries through EBSCO's Flipster platform under ISSN 1187-8681.

Digital Presence

The magazine's website, lesdebrouillards.com, presents the BLD family — Les Débrouillards, Les Explorateurs and Curium — with content for young readers and links to the publisher's activities. Subscriptions are managed on a dedicated, recently relaunched platform, abonnement.lesdebrouillards.com, which offers the regular ten-issue subscription and an EXTRA tier of twelve issues including the Sport Débrouillards and DébrouillArts specials, for delivery by mail within Canada. The Quebec government notes that BLD also produces teaching tools, takes part in podcasts and television series, and runs three science-information websites for its three magazines. Digital library editions are distributed through EBSCO Flipster, extending the print title into school and public libraries outside Quebec.

Ownership and Organisation

Les Débrouillards is published in Montreal by Publications BLD, an independent company created in the early 1990s by the Bayard group together with two Quebec non-profit organisations, the Agence Science-Presse and the province's scientific-leisure council (CDLS, within today's Réseau Technoscience); Québec's 2025 funding release accordingly links BLD to Bayard Canada, the Canadian arm of the French Bayard group. Founder Félix Maltais, the magazine's founding editor, received an honorary doctorate from the Université du Québec à Montréal in 2008 and the Prix Fleury-Mesplet in 2015. In March 2025 the Quebec government announced a grant of $719,457 to Publications BLD under its NovaScience programme, to support the company's science-education mission through 2027; the release named Marie Allard as BLD's general manager and interim editor. The grant and the company's continuing subscription operation confirm a small, mission-driven publisher rather than a large commercial group: BLD's three magazines, its special issues and its educational activities are its whole business.

Contact and Availability

Les Débrouillards is sold by subscription across Canada — the publisher specifies that subscriptions are valid in Canada only — and is delivered in print by mail ten times a year, with the publisher advising four to eight weeks for a first issue to arrive. Subscriptions, renewals and the EXTRA tier are handled through abonnement.lesdebrouillards.com, and the magazine's website is lesdebrouillards.com. Single-title and library access is also available digitally through EBSCO's Flipster service. The publisher, Publications BLD, is based in Montreal, Quebec, and publishes in French.