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  • The Reign of King Babar
  • Harry C. Payne (bio)

The reign of King Babar is one of the most successful political ventures of the twentieth century. Created by Jean de Brunhoff in seven books in the 1930s,1 his world is fictional, but his hold on the minds of children and adults—and the market they command—is quite real. The success of the Babar books has been enormous, both in France and in the English-speaking world. Brunhoff clearly concocted a world of both immediate and enduring appeal. What then is the nature of that appeal? Surely it is in part psychological in the narrow sense. Contained in the simple yet suggestive pictures and the cool, clear narrative, one finds a world designed to please and absorb the child. Trouble is not at all absent from the kingdom of Babar. There are scenes calculated to induce anxiety: the shooting of Babar's mother; the accidental poisoning by mushroom of Babar's royal predecessor; abandonment on a tropical island and the subsequent attack of cannibals; war with the rhinoceroses; the snake that bites the Old Lady; the fire that injures Cornelius; the rattle that almost chokes Flora; and so on. But these troubles always seem to dissolve. The Old Lady replaces Babar's mother; Babar routs the cannibals; the war is won with elephants' derrières painted in monstrous fashion; the Old Lady and Cornelius survive; the monkey Zephir extracts the rattle. Moreover, as Roger Sale has pointed out, the incidents are brief and narrated with a peculiarly adult, reassuring, cool tone.2 The pleasures of the land of the elephants are, though, much more ample than the troubles overcome. Many are the gratifications for the child to see: ample opportunity for play; the companionship of mischevious monkeys; the pleasures of a school that is never dull; and the authority of adults who sometimes scold but always forgive in pleasant ways.

This is probably enough. Still, Babar is about more than children's fears and wishes. It is adult in more than tone. The central character is not a child but a young adult elephant who goes to the city, gets married, has children, and, quite simply, works very hard. [End Page 96] Babar is the happy lord of the numerous fêtes which populate the pages of the books, but he also is the exhausted parent at the end of Babar en famille, the energetic master-builder of Celesteville in Le Roi Babar, and the weary traveler trudging through the snow to bring Christmas to the land of the elephants in Babar et le Père Noël. The Babar books are as much about adult responsibility as about childlike gratification.

The view of adult life offered in the books is, therefore, reassuring but complicated. It is also quite social and political. Unlike the central characters of many children's books, Babar himself creates much of the world in which he works and loves. In most classic children's books, the central character stumbles into a world ready-made for adventure, anxiety, gratification, and triumph: the river of Rat and Mole; the barn of Charlotte and Fern; the wonderland of Alice; the Oz of Dorothy; the Boston Common pond of Jack, Kack, Lack, Mack, Nack, Ouack, Pack, and Quack; and so on. The world of these books exists before the story starts, inviting and shaping the fantasy that follows.

But Babar builds and nurtures a world before our eyes, especially in the central book, Le Roi Babar, which gives us the style of his reign. Paradoxically, he seems to create an adult world out of a more childish one. Our glimpse into the world of the elephants before Babar is brief. We know that they had a king. We know that they had a distant history and a folklore, since Cornelius teaches a song to the children that dated back to the time of the mammoths. We also know that Babar brings many innovations. Indeed, his major qualification for kingship is his experience in the city of humans and the knowledge he brings back. In the course of his reign, therefore, he introduces many of the ways of the...

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