The French author who popularized Babar

Laurent de Brunhoff 1925–2024

The course of Laurent de Brunhoff’s life would be determined by one restless summer night. When he was 5, the future author and illustrator couldn’t sleep, so his mother, Cécile, began telling him and his brother a story. She conjured an orphaned baby elephant who finds a new life in the family’s native Paris, adopts French manners and fashions, and returns home to the jungle to be crowned king. The next day, the boys raced to their father, artist Jean de Brunhoff, to demand illustrations, and Babar soon made his public debut in a half-dozen books. After Jean’s early death from tuberculosis in 1937, Laurent took over, drawing and writing more than 40 Babar books over six decades. “Continuing Babar,” he said, “was prolonging my father’s life.”

De Brunhoff finished his father’s last two books when he was just 13, said The New York Times, then trained to be a painter, exhibiting abstract works for a few years before returning to Babar at age 21. He lent an artistic rigor to Babar’s adventures, and critics compared his “use of color and his naïve style to painters like Henri

Rousseau.” But another kind of criticism soon came his way, said CNN.com. Some academics characterized the tale of a jungle-born elephant celebrated for becoming more European as “an allegory of—and justification for—French colonialism.” In the 1960s, Toni Morrison, then a young editor at Random House, objected to the depiction of Africans as spearwielding savages in Babar’s Picnic, and eventually de Brunhoff requested that the book be withdrawn. But he scoffed at critiques that he’d failed to interrogate the unearned wealth of Babar’s elderly Parisian benefactor, the Old Lady. “These are stories, not social theory,” he said.

De Brunhoff’s “captivating, witty illustrations never lost their appeal,” said The Telegraph (U.K.). Babar books appeared in at least 18 languages and spawned a 1989 movie and multiple TV adaptations. In later years, Babar would explore other planets and take up yoga, adventures that did not necessarily have the books’ target audience in mind. “Babar was my friend,” de Brunhoff said in 2017. “I invented my stories with him, not thinking about the children who would read them. I wrote it for myself.”