Asterix: a world of joyful innocence born in the aftermath of war

As a child, devouring every Asterix book I could lay my hands on, I failed to notice what now, with the sombre perspective of adulthood, I can recognise as perhaps the single most glaring inaccuracy in the series’ portrayal of Caesar’s conquest of Gaul: nobody dies. Even by the standards of Roman imperialism, the Gallic war was unspeakably violent. When Vercingetorix, the most formidable of Caesar’s adversaries, finally surrendered at Alesia, he did so surrounded by innumerable corpses, the limbs of horses and humans horribly tangled, their bellies swollen, their blood fertilising muddied fields.

The celebrated painting completed in 1899 by Lionel Reyer, Vercingetorix Throws His Arms at the Feet of Caesar, barely hints at the scale of this slaughter. Even less so do the parodies of the painting in which Goscinny and Uderzo, the authors of Asterix, so delighted. In these, the most vivid display of agony is likely to be a howl of pain from Caesar as Vercingetorix dumps a pile of armour on his foot. The entire theme of the series is the aftermath of a near-genocidal occupation – and yet the worst that ever happens to anyone in any of its various books is to be left hanging from the branch of a tree with a black eye and stars revolving round the head. The Gaul of Goscinny and Uderzo is a land of cheery, almost jovial, innocence.

Perhaps this is why the news of the death of Albert Uderzo has hit so many so hard. For decades after the death of René Goscinny in 1977, he provided a living link to the golden age of the greatest series of comic books ever written: Paul McCartney to Goscinny’s John Lennon. Uderzo, as the illustrator, was better able to continue the series after Goscinny’s death than Goscinny would have been had Uderzo had died first, and yet the later books were, so almost every fan agrees, not a patch on the originals: very much Wings to the Beatles. What elevated the cartoons, brilliant though they were, to the level of genius was the quality of the scripts that inspired them. Again and again, in illustration after illustration, the visual humour depends for its full force on the accompaniment provided by Goscinny’s jokes.

Equally, though, the conceit that underlay Asterix would have been nothing without Uderzo. The challenge was to portray the age of Julius Caesar in a way that was true to the history and yet an utterly joyous recalibration of it. Brutality had to be portrayed as knockabout; a world of mud and gore and fire repainted in primary colours. Uderzo, who was colour blind, much preferred the clear line to any hint of shade, and it was that that enabled his drawings to redefine antiquity so distinctively in his own terms.

Brilliantly though he draws on the various traditions of Gallic metalwork, or Greek statuary, or Egyptian hieroglyphs to diversify his artwork, nowhere visited by Asterix and Obelix ever slips his ability to render both the Roman empire and the lands beyond its frontiers as belonging to a single, coherent comic world. Simultaneously, however, it is also a portrayal of a very different period: that of the decades after the second world war. No other postwar artist offered Europeans a more universally popular portrait of themselves, perhaps, than did Uderzo. The stereotypes with which he made such affectionate play in his cartoons – the haughty Spaniard, the chocolate-loving Belgian, the stiff-upper-lipped Briton – seemed to be just what a continent left prostrate by war and nationalism were secretly craving.

Uderzo, who had lived through the Nazi occupation of France, certainly needed no reminding of what the realities of occupation might be. “All of Gaul is occupied. All? Not quite!” The village of indomitable Gauls is possibly the most brilliant antidote to Vichy that French literature has to show. The wooden palisades that surround it offer readers the absolute assurance that it will always hold out, that the tide of history will never sweep over it, that at the end of every adventure there will be a feast, with lots of boar, and no singing from Cacofonix.

The joy of it all, though, has long since slipped the specific historical context that saw Uderzo first start sketching Asterix and Obelix back in the 50s. In that, perhaps, the closest parallel to the little village in Armorica is Moomin Valley, which likewise offered to a shattered Europe the vision of a magical world from which war and genocide had been banished and – in the work of Tove Jansson – fused text and illustration to enduringly popular effect.

Janssen died in 2001; now, with the death of Uderzo, another artist who achieved with cartoons a kind of exorcism, a banishing of the shades of misery and war, is gone. Today, with Europe once again stalked by death, there has never been a better time to revisit Uderzo’s great and joyous creation.