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" Lavisse went on to describe Julius Caesar's conquest of Gaul, and the brave resistance of Vercingetorix. Ernest Lavisse's History of France, published in 1900, begins: "Two thousand years ago, France, which was still called Gaul. The myth of "our ancestors the Gaulois", taught to generations of French schoolchildren, took hold at the end of the 19th century. The distinction was made as recently as the 1981 presidential campaign, when the aristocratic Valery Giscard d'Estaing was compared to the Romans and Francois Mitterrand to the Gauls. Then the Jacobins equated the Franks and Romans with nobility and the good Gauls with the common Frenchman.
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Until the 1789 revolution, the French knew only of their Frankish and Roman origins. In reality, the Druids played the more sinister role of providing endless human sacrifices to their greedy gods. In director Claude Zidi's film, the white-robed, gold-staffed Druid Panoramix gathers mistletoe in the forest. The rich brought wine from Marseille and Italy, while everyone else imbibed great quantities of beer. Like their descendants, the Gaulois ate bread and cheese. Upper class men dyed their hair red or blond and - except for their beastly table manners - were cleaner than you might have expected. US productions are far more attractive to the French public and Asterix, Le Monde says, is "a symbol of Gallic resistance to the Hollywood invader".Ī new book called Gaul Recounted to the Gaulois reveals that the first Frenchmen loved wearing bright colours, especially gold and purple. In 1998, only 26 per cent of French box office earnings came from French films. The fact that France financed only 40 per cent of the budget (German companies paid 40 per cent and the Italians the last 20 per cent) is rarely mentioned.įrench film makers are counting on the story of a village in ancient Gaul resisting Roman legions to resuscitate their ailing, heavily subsidised industry. Paris Match published 14 pages of photographs from the movie, and the evening television news regularly broadcasts excerpts.įor the success - or failure - of Asterix is a question of French national pride. Since Christmas, 2,000 Paris newspaper kiosks have been plastered with posters of Gerard Depardieu as the boar-munching hewer of Menhirs, the comic actor Christian Clavier as the diminutive Asterix and the buxom model Laetitia Casta as Obelix's sweetheart Falbala. Nearly 300 million Asterix comic books have been sold throughout the world, making the fictional discoverer of America and inventor of tea and French fries the planet's best known Frenchman. With a 274 million franc (£33 million) budget, the celluloid version of the classic comic strip by Goscinny and Uderzo is the most expensive French-language film ever made, heralded by a media blitz commensurate with its cost.
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You would have to be deaf and blind not to know that Asterix and Obelix Against Caesar will invade cinemas across France today.