“Ils sont fous, ces Gaulois”:Asterixbetween Cold War America and Gaullist France

Much ink has been spilled on the comic strip Asterix, but few observers have paid attention to the contemporaneous political context in which René Goscinny (1926–1977) and Albert Uderzo (1927–2020) produced this Gallic epic, and how it gives meaning to this world-famous comic star. The association of the fictional Gauls resisting Roman occupation in 50 bce with France’s heated public debate in the 1950s and 1960s about the role of the Resistance during the German occupation from 1940 to 1944 was no doubt on the mind of French readers at the time. Yet the Asterix epic also is the most successful francophone comic strip in the world. On the one hand the epic works as anti-American diatribe, which equates the Pax Romana of the ancient past with the Pax Americana of the Cold War. On the other hand it is also an anti-Gaullist critique of France in the 1960s and 1970s. Accordingly the Roman Emperor Julius Caesar stands as a symbol for both the anti-Gaullist United States and the anti-American Charles de Gaulle. The contradictory nature of these two claims might be surprising, but the Asterix epic was never intended to be an internally consistent philosophical treatise. The epic looks more like a precursor to the animated series The Simpsons, given its circular narrative structure, the use of cameos by celebrities, and the parodic commentary on contemporaneous affairs.