HE HAS not changed his green suit since 1931 and has been called a racist and a reactionary, but Babar The Elephant is being fêted as never before in France this summer, featuring in a government campaign and on postage stamps for his 75th birthday.

The amiable king of the elephants, one of France’s best-loved exports, is also being promoted in a worldwide birthday celebration that is boosting the multimillion-pound revenues of Laurent de Brunhoff, his author-illustrator.

De Brunhoff, 80, has been producing the books since 1946 when he took over from Jean de Brunhoff, his illustrator father who created the elephant along with his mother. He died at 38.

The first English-language books were published in London and New York in 1933, with a preface by A.A. Milne.

With astute marketing, the reassuring elephant has, like Milne’s Winnie the Pooh, defied the decades to continue enchanting small children and their parents.

Every second Japanese woman under 30 is said to own a Babar artefact. His television cartoons are now aired in 150 countries and a Babar teaching kit can be downloaded.

A new book, Babar’s World Tour, is out in the autumn. The merchandise and sale of a total of 12 million copies make Babar one of France’s most lucrative brands, according to Les Echos, a business daily.

This summer, families travelling on the main Paris-Mediterranean motorway are being given half a million Babar packs from the Environment Ministry. They include toys and a booklet in which Babar Le P’tit Ecolo (the environmentalist) advises children on how to live a greener life. (“I shower with soap rather than gel. It’s more natural!”) The Post Office has issued 17.5 million birthday stamps that feature the elephant holding up a cake.

Despite some modernisation, Celesteville, Babar’s jungle realm, still has the feel of colonial-era French Africa.

The elephant remains the epitome of bourgeois, pre-feminist fatherhood, keeping a firm hand over his household of Queen Celeste, Pom, Flore and Alexandre. This political incorrectness has drawn fire, mainly from American academics who have called Babar a symbol of imperialist oppression.

In Should We Burn Babar?, published in a 1996, Herbert Kohl, a sociologist, dismissed the Babar kingdom as racist and sexist. Le Monde joked: “At 75, Babar is not just a charismatic, evergreen pachyderm. For those who know how to read between the lines, he also raises essential political and sociological questions.”

De Brunhoff and his admirers see the elephant household as the eternal, happy, loving family, with Babar as the model of sensitive fatherhood.

Isabelle Chevrel, a lecturer at the University of Rennes, said that Babar “belongs to the universe of children through the innocence of his outlook and the supple roundness of his shape”.

She added: “His world is one of love and wisdom, poetry and, nostalgia. It is closed, rich and reassuring.” De Brunhoff, who has lived in Connecticut since marrying an American university teacher in 1988, is annoyed by the criticism. “The idea of a ‘savage’ moving towards civilisation can be attacked as colonialist,” he said last month. “But I don’t think for one second that that’s what’s evoked in a child’s mind . . . It comes from the fact that in the 1930s there was colonialism and France was a colonial power.”

De Brunhoff withdrew from reissuing Picnic at Babar’s, the second album, which he produced after inheriting the elephant at the age of 20. The book, he agreed, conveyed an atmosphere of the time that seems colonial and racist now. “It was the past. African- American parents do not seem to hold it against me. I often see them with their children at signing sessions,” he said.

De Brunhoff said that there was no hatred in the world of Babar, who was at first an orphaned baby elephant dreamt up by his mother to entertain him and his brother at their home on the eastern edge of Paris when he was 6 years old: “An atmosphere of love and humour prevails. The family is solid. But, as in life, tragedies happen. We get over them and emerge stronger.”

Times Recommends

• Michael Jackson: Not the final chapter
• Indian Army spends10m rupees on golf buggies
• Brüno toned down for 15 rating