Laurent de Brunhoff was five years old when his mother invented a story for him and his younger brother: it told of an orphaned African elephant who escapes to Paris, where he is kitted out in a green suit before returning to the jungle to become king of his herd.
De Brunhoff, who has died aged 98, recalled how the excited boys recounted the tale to their father, Jean, an artist, who illustrated the stories and produced a book, Histoire de Babar (The Story of Babar), which was published in 1931.
“And that was how the story of Babar was born. My mother called him Bébé elephant [French for baby]. It was my father who changed the name to Babar. But the first pages of the first book, with the elephant killed by a hunter and the escape to the city, was her story,” he told National Geographic in 2014.
When Jean de Brunhoff died of tuberculosis aged 37 in 1937, after completing five Babar books, the elephant appeared to be heading for literary extinction until Laurent stepped in to carry on the adventures. He added more than 40 Babar books to the seven attributed to his father, the last – Babar’s Guide to Paris – published in 2017.
De Brunhoff was born in Paris, the eldest of the three boys of Jean, an artist who came from a family of publishers, and his wife, Cécile (nee Sabouraud), a pianist. Laurent later admitted he did not recall the exact evening his mother had first recounted the elephant story to him and his brother Mathieu, who was a year younger. He did remember seeing his father sketching the animal at the family’s summer home at Chessy in the Seine-et-Marne department, east of Paris.
“We loved to join him in the late afternoon to see what he had done. We’d watch him add colour,” he said.
It is suggested by the family that Cécile’s story may have had its roots in a letter she had received from relatives who had hunted elephants in what was then the Belgian Congo before settling in Kenya. Be that as it may, Histoire de Babar: Le Petit Éléphant, published at the time of the Paris Colonial Exhibition by Editions du Jardin des Modes, a small family-run publishing firm, was an instant and unexpected success. In 1934 the first English edition appeared, with a preface by AA Milne, author of Winnie the Pooh.
Jean de Brunhoff published a further four Babar books before he died, leaving two unfinished. A year after his death, his brother Michel, editor-in-chief of French Vogue, asked the teenage Laurent to colour the black and white illustration plates Jean had left, to complete two more books. De Brunhoff said the publishers had asked his widowed mother if she would agree to someone else doing the books – to which she had replied: “Never!”
After the second world war, De Brunhoff trained at a private art school, the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, in Paris and harboured ambitions of becoming an abstract painter, but found he could not escape the elephant. “Gradually I began to feel strongly that a Babar tradition existed and that it ought to be perpetuated,” he wrote in the New York Times in 1952.
In 1946, at the age of 21, he published his first book, Babar et Ce Coquin d’Arthur (translated in 1948 as Babar and That Rascal Arthur), copying his father’s style. “My mother was very happy; the publisher was delighted. My two brothers had their own lives. I never asked myself why. I did it very naturally,” he told Le Figaro.
Today, millions of copies of the books have sold worldwide and Babar is a multimedia franchise, star of television series and animated films. From being orphaned, visiting Paris and returning to bring a French form of civilisation to the jungle, Babar has since travelled the world, journeyed to the moon and learned to cook, ski and do yoga – adventures that De Brunhoff insisted were not all written specifically for children.
The children’s writer Maurice Sendak, a Babar fan, wrote: “If he had come my way, how I would have welcomed that little elephant and smothered him with affection.” In a 2004 article in the New York Review of Books, the American novelist Alison Lurie wrote: “Babar’s environment is that of the prosperous, cultured, art-loving French bourgeoisie. Good manners are important, as are fine clothes.”
Critics, however, have accused the books of justifying colonialism and perpetuating racial stereotypes, including the Chilean author Ariel Dorfman in his 1983 book The Empire’s Old Clothes. As Lurie wrote, Babar is “the most famous elephant in the world – and the most controversial”.
In 2012 it was reported that Babar’s Travels had been removed from an East Sussex library in response to complaints of racism in its portrayal of African characters. De Brunhoff admitted that he had depicted “very stereotyped figures” in his second book, Babar’s Picnic (1949): “Some years later I felt embarrassed about this book and asked the publisher to withdraw it”.
De Brunhoff, who was made a member of the Legion d’honneur, married, in 1951, Marie-Claude Bloch, with whom he had two children, Anne and Antoine. The couple separated in 1985 when he moved to the US, and divorced in 1990.
That year he married Phyllis Rose, an American critic and biographer who collaborated with him on the Babar books in later years. She survives him, along with Anne and Antoine, and his brothers Mathieu and Thierry.
• Laurent de Brunhoff, author and illustrator, born 30 August 1925; died 22 March 2024
