Tartarin is the main character in the French writer Alphonse Daudet's novels Tartarin of Tarascon (1872), Tartarin on the Alps (1885) and Port Tarascon (1890). He is a plump and gullible man who is spurred by the small-town dynamics of Tarascon in Provence to go on a series of misadventures abroad. The stories are written as parodies of heroic genres.
History and description
The Tartarin character originated with
Alphonse Daudet's desire to use his experiences from
French Algeria, which he visited in 1861–1862, in a work of fiction. A precursor to the Tartarin stories was Daudet's comedic short story "Chapatin le tueur de lions" (). Daudet abandoned his original plan to write a
Literary realism about Algeria and instead focused on the humorous delusions of an adventurer in Africa. In the first Tartarin novel,
Tartarin of Tarascon from 1872, the plump, middle-aged and gullible protagonist goes to Africa to hunt lions, spurred by the dynamics of his
Provence home town of
Tarascon. The book became a commercial success, eventually prompting Daudet to write two sequels. The first sequel,
Tartarin on the Alps from 1885, mocks the heroic tropes of
mountaineering literature. The second,
Port Tarascon from 1890, is a parody of the colonial novel.
The mock-heroic character has been compared to
Alonso Quijano.
Legacy
Georges Méliès made the first film about Tartarin, the lost
from 1908. The character was portrayed by
Raimu in the 1934 film
Tartarin of Tarascon[Bessy, Maurice & Chirat, Raymond. Histoire du cinéma français: 1929-1934. Pygmalion, 1988. p. 484] and by
Francis Blanche in the 1962 film
Tartarin of Tarascon.
[Goble, Alan. The Complete Index to Literary Sources in Film. Walter de Gruyter, 1999. p. 106]
There are two German operas about the character, one composed by that premiered in Cologne in 1965 and one composed by that premiered in Hamburg in 1977.
There is a bronze sculpture of Tartarin in Tarascon. A museum devoted to the character existed in Tarascon from 1985 to 2008, after which the building became a private residence.
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