Babar the eternal earner

If you have been driving with small children this summer down the A6, or, to use its corny nickname,  L'Autoroute du Soleil, you may have been the lucky recipient of a Babar bag.

Handed out at toll booths, this consists of a few toys and booklet in which Babar the Elephant lectures children on ecologically correct behaviour. "I shower with soap rather than gel. It's more natural!" Babar tells the under eights who are his fans. "I prefer to eat fresh products when it's their season. They are tastier."

With "Babar le P'tit Ecolo (the little environmentalist)", the Environment Ministry has recruited one of France's best-loved children's characters to its cause, as the amiable king of the elephants is being deployed in a blitzkrieg of celebration and merchandising for his 75th birthday.  Never before has Babar and his world been so fêted. The French post office has even put out 17.5 million stamps featuring him with a birthday cake.

The Babar phenomenon shows how timeless values plus marketing can overcome the forces of political correctness. For PC hardliners, Babar is a racist bourgeois who showed have stayed in the colonial era.

Babar was invented by Cecile de Brunhoff, a Parisian pianist, to entertain her children. He was drawn by Jean, her illustrator husband, and then published in 1931. After Jean de Brunhoff's early death, Laurent, his 20-year-old son, also an artist, took over the character in 1946. He has since produced some 35 albums, selling some 12 million in 17 languages. The first English-language albums were issued in London and New York in 1933, with a preface by A.A. Milne.
   
Like Milne's Winnie the Pooh, Babar has defied the decades to continue enchanting small children and their parents.  Every second Japanese woman under 30 is said to own a Babar artifact. His television cartoons are aired in 160 countries and a Babar teaching kit can be downloaded. De Brunhoff, now 80, is issuing a new album,  Babar's World Tour  this autumn. The merchandise and sale of a total of 12 million albums had made Babar one of France's most lucrative brands, Les Echos, a business daily, said this week.

Despite some modernisation, Celesteville, Babar's jungle realm, still has the feel of colonial-era French Africa. The elephant remains the epitome of  pre-feminist fatherhood, keeping a firm hand over his household of Queen Celeste, Pom, Flore and Alexandre. This political incorrectness has drawn fire, mainly from American academics who have called Babar a symbol of imperialist oppression. In Should We Burn Babar?, a 1996 book, Herbert Kohl, a sociologist, dismissed the Babar kingdom as imperialist sexist. Le Monde joked the other day: "At 75, Babar is not just a charismatic, evergreen pachyderm. For those those who know how to read between the lines, he also raises essential political and sociological questions."

Brunhoff's admirers see the elephant household as the eternal, happy, loving family, with Babar as the model of sensitive fatherhood. Isabelle Nières-Chevrel, a Rennes University lecturer, said Babar "belongs to the universe of children through the innocence of his outlook and the supple roundness of his shape." She added: "His world is one of love and wisdom, poetry and, nostalgia. It is closed, rich and reassuring."

De Brunhoff, who has lived in Connecticut since marrying an American university teacher in 1988, is annoyed by the criticism.  "The idea of a 'savage' moving towards civilization can be attacked as colonialist," he said last month. "But I don't think for one second that that's what's evoked in a child's mind....It comes from the fact that in the 1930s, there was colonialism and France was a colonial power."

 

    Incidentally, De Brunhoff attributes his own fine state of physical health to long practice of yoga. His Yoga for Elephants has converted many grown-ups to the practice.

Comments

[wrath666]

To be honest, I didn't know before reading your post that Babar was French. Maybe we French people are ashamed of it:)

[Sarah Hague]

I think Isabelle Nières-Chevrel sums up Babar best. He is a very appealing character for children, who are not really bothered by political correctness, feminazism or any other aggressive/passive-aggressive form of manipulation.

[Tara]

Thank you so much for this post. I teach first grade students here in the United States and de Brunhoff's books were some of the first I featured in reading time. (First grade students are six, turning age seven, in America.)

My students see them the way I did, when my mother read them with her faux-French accent (derived from her high school days): charming, simple, and timeless.

Let the PCers remember what it was like to be a child - - sometimes, things are exactly as they appear. I'm not one for disguising the truth, but there are nuggets of wisdom and humor that can't be ignored or duplicated.

A wonderful trip down memory lane, Mr. Bremner!