Asterix: the same or the other?

Nicolas Rouvière is not his first attempt: specialist in children’s literature and popular literature, he had already given in 2006 a Asterix or the lights of civilization (Puf) who had received the prize The world university research. “” Me, that’s the other Could be the motto of a work obsessed with the meeting of otherness and dominated by a universalism that is both naive and smiling. Otherness is that of Egypt toAsterix and CleopatraWallonia ofAsterix in BelgiansSpain ofAsterix in Hispaniafrom EnglandAsterix in Bretonsetc. So many journeys where the stereotypes of foreign populations and those who weave representations of Gallic/French national identity are systematically parodied as well as well as well as well as well as well.

It is at the sources of the project that has become so famous that the distinctive features of this company meet. It is first of all, in 1961, to create a series that would accompany the launch of the newspaper Pilot. This new publication intends to counterbalance the success of American comics by choosing to develop subjects related to French culture. This is how Goscinny and Uderzo plan to his hexagonal historical folklore and stop on “ Our ancestors the Gauls ». Asterix, figurehead of national cultural revenge in the mode (already !) Of a “ exception »To imperialisms (Roman, American, etc.) ? There is obviously that in the small village which “ resists the invader again and again ». But things are not so simple.

Because Alberto Uderzo and René Goscinny are both the children of a tormented story, made of migration and painful integrations. The first is the son of a modest family of Italian immigrants who arrived in France in 1922, one of these “ macaronis From the 1930s on which Itophobia fell from the time. René Goscinny, for his part, is the son of a Polish Jew who came to study in Paris. Installed in Argentina in 1928, his direct family escapes the horrors of the Second World War, but three of his uncles die in the camps of Auschwitz and Pithiviers. After a detour by the United States, where he met several designers, he finally returned to France after the war.

In the light of these courses, we readily follow the analyzes of Nicolas Rouvière: far from a narrowed chauvinism, the parody of identities appears as the lever that is both comical and critical of a joyful reconciliation. This look could only be built in a mixture of tenderness and distance (“ La Lozère, Deux-Sèvres, it was for me Timbuktu or the Rio de Oro », Entrusted Goscinny to L’Express In March 1974, by evoking his adolescence).

But the biographies do not say everything. It is the imposing library of the screenwriter (from the Gaul War to the history textbooks of pre-war schoolchildren via the Tour de France by two children) that he patiently exhumes the nourishing elements of the project, scrutinizing an immense store of common representations and conventions with and against which the adventures we know were built. Abraracoucix will come out made up in “ Carnival Clovis “, Panoramix in emblem of a” secular wisdom “, And Asterix himself in the reversed figure of this Gallic warrior, tall, blond, with blue eyes, which haunts textbooks. The little hero finally shares more with Mickey than with Vercingétorix, and the couple he forms with Obélix recalls more Laurel and Hardy than the friendly martials of the epics of yesteryear. But Gallic Peace in Armorican is obviously better than the Pax Romana of these crazy Romans. And if everything usually ends in song, here the bard will end up tied up at the foot of a oak while the others will bomb.

To read Nicolas Rouvière who remarkably revives the innumerable echoes between the work and the voluminous heritage of representations from the national popular culture that she brews and reworks, we no longer doubt the reasons for an unparalleled success, which remained mysterious in the eyes of Goscinny himself. This is because Asterix is ​​first of all a great comic work, in accordance with the principle of comedy: Castigat Ridendo Mores. The French Society of the Thirty Glorious Finishing is recognized and laughs at itself, of its old habits as well as its discoveries, its traditions as its breathtaking modernization: real estate promoters (The domain of the gods), THE Smig (“ Minimum of Gallic interest »), Holidays in Spain (Asterix in Hispania), the bureaucracy (the Coquelus company in The Arverne shield),, The Star Trail (Jean Richard in unhappy tamer of Caesar laurels), the Tour de France (the map of Gaul Tour), THE Hlm (“ Mixed Latin dwellings ), Enarchs and other technocrats (Obélix and C^ie) …

Very associated with the imagination of the middle and popular classes of the post-war industrial society, these images and memories are still familiar to us. But the documentary work led by Nicolas Rouvière is all the more precious as certain references, obvious for readers of the 1960s, are undoubtedly less today. The great Blond and Proud Gauls no longer occupy the same place in history textbooks and the national pantheon. The imagery of popular customs of France in the years 1950-1960, which largely structures the daily uses of the small Armorican tribe and whose late Pierre Sansot once gave if just paintings-it is necessary to reread his Little people -, herself took some wrinkles. Memories of Latin version and Roman civilization have also faded. Asterix’s latest adventures certainly continue to tackle cultural stereotypes, but the comic distance to national mythologies that had rocked their childhood, is less sensitive. The era of imperial ambitions – if still presents in a France which, at the threshold of the 1960s, brings the memory of the occupation strongly, cultivates the story of the resistance but sees the last pieces of its own colonial power disappear one by one – today seems more distant. In fact, the parodic resonance of the main characters and their universe tends to get rid of.

Gradually cut off from this memory, is Asterix condemned to become a stereotype, an element of the great heritage of conventions ? The question now arises as to whether the albums will not only survive their original context, but also to their recovery, even their diversion, by what they were making it precisely derision: institutionalized and industrialized leisure. “” Me, that’s the other Said Goscinny. From the top of the debates on the globalization and the irredentism of a José Bové, as from the bottom of the cinemas where we now give mustachous and noisy Olympiads, it is another formula which is essential, more short, more flat: “ Asterix is ​​France ».