The gilets jaunes were but the 50BC bagarreurs villagers from Asterix in hi-vis jackets.
France is the most authoritarian country in Western Europe, a place where La Poste dictates the size of your letter box. In the Asterix oeuvre the Roman Empire is a perennial stand-in for the dirigiste French state. (And who is Macron, he who compares opponents of his reforms to “unyielding Gauls”, but a latter day Caesar?) Asterix is France’s Ego. Asterix is France’s literary Catharsis.
More: The Roman Empire is metaphor too for the external threats to the l’hexagone; Asterix the product was born in a France consumed by Collaborator Syndrome from the Second World War, the imperial military disaster at Dien Bien Phu, and the war in Algeria. Goscinny and Uderzo stripped back French history to the clean beginning, to “nos ancêtres les Gaulois”, with a hero modelled explicitly on Vercingetorix, the real-life anti-Caesar rebel. With a sweep of a brush and the line of a pen, Goscinny and Uderzo rearranged collective memory of the war to become honour-saving Resistance against Nazi Occupation (read Gauls vs Romans), while simultaneously creating a French national identity as a people forever proud and pugnacious. Indomitable.
By toutatis! A real magic potion for the tribe!
In case, any reader missed the French connection to the war, Asterix and the Goths (1963) featured Germans with pressure cookers used for torture. Gas chambers, in other words.
Goscinny was Jewish.
Two thirds of the population of France have read at least one Asterix book, the figure rising to nine tenths of men. And they have supped deep the mythology in its pages. In France life has come to imitate cartoon art; the citizens of the Fifth Republic are not the people of Vichy, but the uppity résistantes of a little village in Lucretia. Dispense with the de Beauvoir, give Houellebecq the hump; it is in the works of Goscinny and Uderzo that you read the mind of the French of the Fifth Republic.
France is in thrall to Gaullism. Asterix the Gaullism, that is. Thus, one medium-sized European country remains heroically unconquered by the mondialisation of everyday life.
The Gaullist resistance is everywhere, from the exclusive totality of ‘Origine France’ meat at Leclerc hypermarket to the anti-Anglo-Saxon language patrols of l’Académie Francaise.
Of course, the French are their antimonies, the phrase “c’est compliqué’’ a staple of every conversation. Since The Mansions of the Gods in 1973 Asterix has repeatedly biffed consumerism (in the above volume patrician Roman wives scramble to buy authentic antiques from perfect little chichi shops — in reality the humble shops of the Gaulish village selling their everyday items). Oh, the irony.
Despite Goscinny dying prematurely in 1977 — “like the Eiffel Tower falling” in the words of one obituarist — and then Uderzo retiring to leave relative unknowns Jean-Yves Ferri and Didier Conrad continuing the series, the Asterix commercial empire has burgeoned bigger than one of Obelix’s wild boar dinners. Aside from Parc Astérix, there are Asterix video games, movies (with Gerard Depardieu as Obelix, a role you feel he was born to play), product endorsements, et cetera, et cetera.
Even as a staunch Gaullist, I admit that the book-output of the Ferri-Conrad tandem has been variable. They deserve laurels, though, for 2017’s Asterix and the Chariot Race, which contains a prophecy Getafix would have been proud of. Ferri-Conrad conjured up a character called… Coronavirus. He is Caesar’s pet charioteer and, naturellement, the evil Emperor leans on race organisers to let him win for the honour of Rome.
Does Astérix le Gaulois beat Coronavirus the Roman?
Are baguettes long? Is Proust’s In Search of Lost Time unreadable?
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