Laurent de Brunhoff, creator and heir to the “Babar” picture book series, passes away at the age of 98

Having brought back to life his father’s beloved picture book series about an elephant-king, “Babar” author Laurent de Brunhoff oversaw the series’ growth into a multiplatform, international phenomenon. He was ninety-eight.

 

According to his wife, Phyllis Rose, De Brunhoff, a native of Paris who immigrated to the United States in the 1980s, passed away on Friday at his Key West, Florida, home after two weeks of hospice care.

Laurent was only twelve years old when his father, Jean de Brunhoff, passed away from tuberculosis. However, he was an adult when he used his artistic and storytelling abilities to create dozens of books about the elephant that rules Celesteville, including “Babar at the Circus” and “Babar’s Yoga for Elephants.” Compared to his father, he was more of a minimalist, yet his pictures had Jean’s subtle elegance.

Author Ann S. Haskell said in The New York Times in 1981 that “father and son have woven a fictive world so seamless that it is nearly impossible to detect where one stopped and the other started.”

The series has been adapted for television, as well as animated films including “Babar: The Movie” and “Babar: King of the Elephants.” It has sold millions of copies worldwide. Maurice Sendak, who once said, “If he had come my way, how I would have welcomed that little elephant and smothered him with affection,” was among the admirers, along with Charles de Gaulle.

“Babar, c’est moi” (that’s me) is how De Brunhoff would describe his creation. In a 2014 interview with National Geographic, he said, “He’s been my whole life, for years and years, drawing the elephant.”

The novels did not appeal to everyone. The part in the premiere, “The Story of Babar, the Little Elephant,” whereby hunters shoot and murder Babar’s mother, made several parents go away. A number of critics labeled the series as racist and imperialist, pointing to Babar’s Parisian schooling as having influenced his (presumed) reign in Africa. The novels are described in 1983 by Chilean author Ariel Dorfman as a “implicit history that justifies and rationalizes the motives behind an international situation in which some countries have everything and other countries almost nothing.”

“Babar’s history,” said Dorfman, “is none other than the fulfillment of the dominant countries’ colonial dream.”

“Babar,” according to The New Yorker’s Paris-based journalist Adam Gopnik, “is not an unconscious expression of the French colonial imagination; it is a self-conscious comedy about the French colonial imagination and its close relation to the French domestic imagination.” Gopnik wrote this in 2008.

It was “a little embarrassing to see Babar fighting with Black people in Africa,” as De Brunhoff himself admitted. In particular, he urged his publisher to remove “Babar’s Picnic,” a 1949 book that included obscene depictions of African Americans and Native Americans.

 

Jean de Brunhoff and painter Cecile de Brunhoff had three sons, the oldest of whom was De Brunhoff. When Babar’s wife, Cecile de Brunhoff—the namesake of the elephant kingdom—improvised a tale for her children, Babar was born.

In order to divert our attention, my mother began telling us stories, de Brunhoff said to National Geographic in 2014. “We were so excited about it that we hurried to our father’s study, which was located in a garden corner, the next day to tell him about it. Quite amused, he began to sketch. That was the beginning of the Babar narrative. In French, “baby,” is “bebe elephant,” as my mother nicknamed him. My father was the one who gave me the new name Babar. However, her narrative began in the first few pages of the book, with the hunter killing the elephant and her escape into the city.”

Le Jardin Des Modes, a family-run publisher, launched the debut in 1931. After Babar’s first success, Jean de Brunhoff wrote four additional Babar novels before passing away at the age of 37, six years later. After the Second World War, no one else contributed to the series until Laurent, who was by then a painter, made the decision to revive it. His uncle, Michael, assisted in the publication of two more pieces.

In 1952, he said in The New York Times, “I gradually started to feel strongly that a Babar tradition existed and that it ought to be perpetuated.”

De Brunhoff was twice married; the most recent marriage was to Phyllis Rose, a critic and biographer who penned the text for some of the most recent “Babar” books, including as the 2017 title “Babar’s Guide to Paris,” which was touted as the series finale. Though he did not write specifically for young readers, the author did have two children, Anne and Antoine.

“Writing books, I never really think about kids,” he said to the Wall Street Journal in 2017. “I used to make up tales in my head with my buddy Barbar, but not with children. I compose it with myself in mind.