Jean de Brunhoff's Advice to Youth: The Babar Books as Books of Courtesy

The Babar books by Jean de Brunhoff have been enjoyed by children and acclaimed and purchased by adults for fifty years. They have been translated into many languages, changed in size and typeface, and reprinted in varying editions.¹ They have inspired clothes, dolls, games, television shows, ballets, and musical compositions of distinction. And on both sides of the Atlantic, they have been commended for their "fine dose of foolishness," "distinguished nonsense," "le charm naïf" and examined for their sophistication and wit, Freudian overtones, political didacticism, and subtle satire on human life.²

The books may indeed possess all these qualities, but that fact alone does not account for the permanent claim they have as superior children's literature. Underlying their pure delight, adventurous plots, lively characters, evocative settings, and whimsical style is their essentially serious theme: the earnest concern of a father for how his young family should be brought up, a concern for their morals and their manners. Failure to perceive this concern and the traditional mode in which it is expressed has led one critic to suggest that the books lack "a narrative proposition to guide or offer power" and to imply that they have no unifying principle, "the task not being to get somewhere in particular."³ In fact, their "narrative proposition," their structure—and so their power—becomes evident only when their kinship with that old genre, the book of courtesy, is recognized.

At the end of Babar and His Children, the elephant-king sighs, "Truly it is not easy to bring up a family." As if acknowledging this, Jean de Brunhoff has written books of parental advice, the oldest type of courtesy literature, in which the clear task is to guide his own sons into honorable manhood, providing at the same time a courtesy ideal for other children, and all the while captivating an ageless audience.

I do not imply that Brunhoff set out deliberately to modernize the traditional book of parental advice and so merely adapted that genre, point by point, to his purposes. But the similarities between the Babars and the old courtesies are more than passing or occasional. The systematic attention to morals and manners that structures the early books also shapes Brunhoff's series. His style is not didactic like that of the traditional courtesies nor his purpose only to instill worthwhile behavior, yet his narrative and form, words and pictures, are balanced to delight and shape young personalities. The books' critical worth, the series' unity, and perhaps the universal and lasting appeal of the Babars are illuminated if seen as the thoughtful, solicitous wisdom of a father speaking to his own children.

The ideals reflect Brunhoff's own Gallic tradition, central to which is the family group (le foyer), the ambience of "familyness" (en famille), and the interrelation of distinct roles. Mother-father interaction is crucially influential on children and must be loving and constant; mother-child relationships are different from father-child bonds; sibling relationships are equally delineated. Children are taught to behave within a controlled structure of expectations and not to question parents' authority or discipline within the foyer. This insistence on control at the earliest age leads the child to exercise self-control when his world expands beyond the foyer. That world also has special behavioral expectations, and so French children learn to model the rules of correct social conduct. Freedom and true individuality, say French parents, are but the development of new variations on culturally accepted designs. They still love and indulge their children and understand childhood's unique charms, but they insist that

childhood [be] a long apprenticeship in becoming a person. Through training, the child gradually is transformed from a small being into an individual, an adult with an awakened spirit, a developed imagination, and a critical intelligence, who knows the behavior appropriate to a man and a woman, and who has acquired the skills and control necessary for well-being. . . . The experiences of childhood are conceived as necessary preparations to achieve bonheur.⁴

This regimen implies continuing...