Monsieur Cartoon. Asterix & Obelix, the Wild West and the schoolboy who looks just like Sarkozy

In Paris, between Rue Primo Levi and Rue Thomas Mann—whether a deliberate choice or a happy coincidence—Rue René Goscinny runs along the banks of the Seine. The enamelled sign attached to a post features the densest text found on any typical Parisian sign, set against a midnight blue and green background; signs that have also become souvenirs and fridge magnets. The sign reads: “It is the year 50 BC. All of Gaul is occupied by the Romans… All of it? No! A small village in Armorica still resists the invader… And life is not easy for the garrisons of Roman legionaries in the fortified camps of Babaorum, Aquarium, Petibonum and Laudanum…”. This is the famous opening line of the Asterix & Obelix comic series, about the two Gauls who defy Caesar and his European rule, the two barbarians who stand up to the empire. This hugely successful series was created by Goscinny, whose centenary is being celebrated this year. A magazine such as Casemate asks on its cover: “Is Goscinny heading for the Pantheon?”. Those who create bande dessinée, or BD as the French abbreviate it, may enjoy the same honours as Simone Veil or Marc Bloch. After all, Tintin albums sit on people’s home bookshelves with the same naturalness as an old paperback of Les Misérables or a Pleiade edition of Chateaubriand. Unlike in Italy, comics are not merely for enthusiasts, nerds, or children; they are serious business, a source of national pride, and part of the collective imagination. On that plaque in the 13th arrondissement, beneath Goscinny’s name, it says, first and foremost, ‘writer’ and then ‘comic book scriptwriter’; alongside Asterix, there are the cowboy Lucky Luke, the schoolboy Petit Nicolas, and other national icons. Goscinny used to say that he realised he wanted to be a scriptwriter when he heard someone say: ‘A comic book scriptwriter? It’s a job any old idiot could do.’ In Angoulême, the city of the ninth art thanks to its massive comic book festival – a sort of Lucca on the other side of the Alps – they have erected an obelisk engraved with this very phrase.

But let us return to the location of this Parisian street, which runs parallel to those of Levi and Mann. Like them, Goscinny also experienced first-hand the tragedy of the Nazi seizure of power: at least eleven of René’s relatives – uncles, grandparents – perished at Auschwitz. Goscinny was the son of a chemical engineer from Warsaw and a Ukrainian woman, both of whom had fled with their families from anti-Jewish persecution in the Russian Empire. They arrived in Paris during the First World War, where they met and married. One grandfather was a rabbi; the other was a printer and the author of the first Yiddish–Hebrew dictionary. When René was two years old, his family moved to Buenos Aires. His father worked not only as an engineer but also as a member of the Jewish Colonisation Association, which helped Jews flee from countries where they were persecuted (and the Holocaust had not yet begun). He attended a French secondary school in Argentina, spent holidays in Uruguay, went on weekend horse-rides across the pampas with gauchos, and read comic books brought from Paris as well as local strips such as those featuring Patoruzú, a Patagonian Amerindian who seeks to free his people from oppression. Letters arrived from France describing the compulsory wearing of the yellow star and synagogues being burnt down. His father swore allegiance to De Gaulle from afar, but, just as René was finishing his A-levels, he died of a brain haemorrhage. His mother moved with the children to stay with an uncle in New York. They had no money, and 18-year-old René, after doing various odd jobs, began drawing for an advertising agency.

The war has only just ended and the young man returns home for just a year to do his military service with the Alpine troops. It is said that a general, Jean de Lattre de Tassigny – a Gaullist and key figure in the Liberation who had stood up to the Wehrmacht in the Ardennes – fell in love with the drawings Goscinny produced between drills and, for this reason, promoted him to sergeant, sending him to produce posters for the army. After his military service, Goscinny decided to return to New York, because there, he said, comics ‘were not considered a minor art form’, and he knocked on the doors of magazines and newspapers, even trying to work for Walt Disney, but without success. He thus returned to advertising, briefly, because he met another son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Harvey Kurtzman, who would go on to work with Playboy and found that seminal comic magazine, Mad Magazine (for a time, Kurtzman would also work for the future president’s magazine, the self-congratulatory monthly Trump).Kurtzman’s humour – which, by their own admission, would go on to influence directors such as Mel Brooks and Terry Gilliam – also played a formative role for the young René, who, alongside his American friend, began to earn his first money through comics. With the small nest egg he had saved up, he returned to Paris by ship for the holidays, where he met a Belgian colleague who introduced him to his compatriot Morris, who had been educated by the Jesuits in Flanders.

Morris, the son of a pipe maker, had just created a character – a cowboy from the Old West – and had arrived in America to better research the setting he wanted to give to the stories of this solitary cowboy who believed in justice. However, it was through his collaboration with Goscinny, who became his scriptwriter, that the character assumed his definitive form, incorporating sharp social criticism into the narratives, and Lucky Luke became ‘the man who shoots faster than his shadow’. The series evolved into a pop-culture phenomenon through which the French-speaking world, and later the rest of Europe, came to know the Old West—or a version of it. The frontier epic took on a comic, parodic slant. In the 1950s, when the American dream was in full swing and cinemas were showing films by John Ford and Robert Aldrich starring Gary Cooper and John Wayne – no longer merely epic tales, but also depicting contradictions and tormented gunslingers – young French and Belgian people were introduced to saloons, canyons, sawmills and sheriffs through a humorous lens. Lucky Luke is an impartial arbiter, a man driven not by money or power, but by the desire to bring peace to frontier villages. Readers learn to laugh at America, at how it was built, using it as a mirror for a Europe reborn after 1945.

This is how Goscinny introduced the Old West to the French, but he became even more famous when he decided to recount the past to his compatriots as well – a past that was largely fictional, however much one might read De bello Gallico. It all began with another chance encounter, this time with Albert Uderzo, a Frenchman whose parents were Italian immigrants: a luthier from the province of Vicenza and a woman from Tuscany. Both were, as we would say today, part of the ‘first generation’. They met by chance in Paris, in the corridors of World Press on the Champs-Élysées. Goscinny had returned to Europe permanently. The two took a liking to one another and began writing, under a female pseudonym, an etiquette column. They enjoyed themselves and thus began their comic partnership, and after a few comic strips, in 1959, the newly launched Pilote – a magazine aiming to ‘guide’ French children and instil a curiosity about the world – featured a little rooster with a yellow moustache who, accompanied by his little dog and his burly friend the menhir sculptor, stood up to the colonial abuses of the Roman centurions. The project was conceived in a flat in Bobigny; Pilote was about to be launched and they still hadn’t come up with an idea. They then began listing France’s glorious moments, and when they reached the Gauls, they realised they had hit the nail on the head: after all, said René, “the Gauls are our Wild West”. The two protagonists were modelled on Laurel and Hardy, whilst their names were two typographical symbols: the asterisk and the obelisk.

However much one might search Strabo’s works for real-life examples, Asterix offers a hyper-patriotic, alternate-history interpretation of events, depicting the ancestors of the French as revellers feasting on roast wild boar, terrified that the sky might fall on their heads, yet capable, thanks to a magic potion, of resisting the Roman legions. Celtic wisdom triumphs over Roman engineering; a handful of die-hard, traditionalist rebels manage to stand up to Rome’s globalising Leviathan and the standardisation of a centralised state. It is David versus Goliath. The Gauls brawl amongst themselves, squabbling whilst hurling fish and stones at one another, but at the end of each episode they get drunk round the fire, whilst the elegant Romans, on their tricliniums in their marble-clad palaces, accept this minor setback in their domination of the globe. Asterix’s travels become an exploration of the pre-Christian world, with twentieth-century clichés applied to the customs of 50 BC: from the stoic Britons tending their lawns and drinking lukewarm cervogia, to the Corsicans, who are touchy and obsessed with revenge and the siesta, right through to the Helvetians, who love punctuality, neutrality and cheese. These humorous anachronisms, including a hint of ‘beer-phobia’, might today draw the ire of the ‘woke’ world. Ten years ago, addressing the European Parliament, the philosopher Fernando Savater urged MEPs to read the Asterix & Obelix albums in order to understand Europeans and not to be alarmed by the comical stereotypes that help deflate nationalism. This is also because the Le Pen-led right has always sought to appropriate the rhetoric of the indomitable Gallic village, which many believe is actually modelled on the Gaullist resistance to Vichy and the Third Reich. Left-wing politicians, on the other hand, have extolled the village’s environmentalism and its democratic-collectivist governance. “Is Asterix right-wing or left-wing?”, asked Le Nouvel Obs, to which an Écolo MP replied: “In the village, families and professional groups: everything is stable. So, obviously, it is also a reflection of a pre-1968 France – quite self-assured, very orderly, paternalistic.”

To round off the trilogy of Goscinny’s three major works, in collaboration with a master such as Sempé – who would go on to become one of the most beloved cover illustrators for The New Yorker – Petit Nicolas was created, finding its ideal form in picture books. It is no coincidence that the first volume was published in 1959, the same year that Truffaut’s "The 400 Blows" hit the cinemas. For, like Antoine Doinel – a symbol of the Nouvelle Vague – little Nicolas is a child navigating French urban life, through the streets, squares and parks, grappling with the contradictions of the adult world. It is an optimistic reflection of post-war society, of the 1960s, where the anxieties of grown-ups and their conflicts do not (too) disturb the games in the school playgrounds. Much like in Peanuts, his school friends embody human virtues and quirks. “Petit Nicolas is timeless, because he’s never been in fashion,” said Goscinny’s daughter, Anne. “That’s his secret. Nicolas hasn’t aged; he hasn’t grown up.” “Little Nicholas was already out of fashion back then,” says Sempé, because that France is beginning to cease to exist – a France shaped by their childhoods, so different and yet containing universal themes in which everyone can recognise themselves. The pages depict an ideal childhood, where schoolchildren play pranks on their teachers and eat apple tart. Upon Sempé’s death in 2020, President Macron spoke of “tender irony and delicate intelligence”. He is so famous in France that when Sarkozy took office at the Élysée Palace, ‘Petit Nicolas’ became – owing to the president’s stature – one of the nicknames used by his opponents and the press, complete with cartoons. When he was sent to prison, Charlie Hebdo revived the nickname, launching an appeal to ‘get little Nicolas out of prison’.

In the 1960s, Goscinny—an avid cruiser—met his future wife, a 24-year-old student of Oriental languages, on a ship bound for the Antilles; she did not recognise him. The following day, he gave her a copy of "Les Aventures de Petit Nicolas". As she read it, she thought: ‘This man is a genius!’. The couple married in the upmarket 16th arrondissement, where they settled—the same neighbourhood to which he had brought his mother from New York as soon as he had saved a bit of money. Goscinny died ten years later, in 1977, aged 51, from a heart attack. And his creations continue to be a moneymaker. Even today, sold in supermarkets, motorway service stations and petrol stations, the Asterix albums still make it into the charts. A new one is released every year, featuring new illustrators and scriptwriters, in December – the peak shopping season. In total, more than five hundred million volumes bearing Goscinny’s name have been sold. The brand has also been adapted for cinema: both the cowboy and the schoolboy have been turned into films and series, and there are around fifteen feature films based on Asterix, four of which star Putin’s former friend, Gérard Depardieu, in the role of Obelix. A brand that continues to capture the French imagination, in their pure Napoleonic spirit, leading them to believe that, deep down, alongside the barbarians they stood up to the ancient colonisers; that, through the ‘ligne claire’ style and humour, history can be rewritten, making the Romans look like fools.

Yet Goscinny’s fame is not solely due to having bent the story slightly to celebrate the little underdogs. A few years ago, the Museum of Jewish Art and History in Paris dedicated an exhibition to Goscinny, to rediscover his origins and – even though it was entitled ‘Beyond the Laughter’ – also to celebrate his Jewish humour. This humour goes hand in hand with a critique of power, in true Marx Brothers style – almost anarchic – and with the creation of astute anti-heroes uninterested in personal gain. The protagonists are not driven by brute force, but by a Homeric ‘multifaceted ingenuity’. Described as the ‘Molière of comics’ – partly due to a certain moralism – and also as the ‘Victor Hugo of BD’, Goscinny was able to expose the irritating quirks of bureaucracy and social hypocrisies in a way that is no longer so easy to do today. ‘When you are very young,’ he used to say, ‘humour is a defence. Later on, it can become a weapon.’