Is it time for ‘Asterix’ to retire the ‘Roman’ salute?
The Netflix series of ‘The Big Fight’ is delightful satire, but there’s a problem
Caesar and the Romans never used this salute — but it has, indeed, taken off. Courtesy of Netflix
By PJ Grisar May 7, 2025
Asterix the Gaul, the wing-helmeted hero of Armorica, has always lived in a time both before the modern world and in the messy middle of it.
The character’s delightful new Netflix series, Asterix & Obelix: The Big Fight, is chockablock with references to Disney attractions, televised sports and Pulp Fiction. In an updated twist to its punny predilections, it even introduces a young Roman in charge of logistics by the name of Metadata. But perhaps the show’s most strident take on contemporary politics comes in the form of a supposedly ancient gesture.
In a flashback in the first episode, village chief Vitalstatistix pooh-poohs the village druid Getafix over the threat of a young general named Julius Caesar and his ambitions for Gaul.
“This Caesar has no future,” Vitalstatistix insists, and hastens to add, “and that salute of his?” — he demonstrates, clicking his heels and raising his arm at a 45-degree angle, “It will never take off.”
Oh, but it did.
The joke is, of course, on the Nazis who’d popularize the salute, but naturally it now speaks also to the movements of Elon Musk and his imitators. The sieg heil is sorta having a moment, but it goes way back, if not as far as Roman times.
Asterix was created in 1959 by the French-Jewish writer René Goscinny (who grew up in Argentina) and the Italian French artist Albert Uderzo. The men were children of immigrants — Goscinny’s parents were from Ukraine and Poland; Uderzo’s arrived from Italy — and came of age during World War II.
In Buenos Aires, Goscinny’s father worked for the Jewish Colonization Association, which helped settle Jewish refugees fleeing persecution. Many of the writer’s family in France — which included the printers of the first Hebrew-Yiddish dictionary — were arrested and deported to Auschwitz, where they were murdered, and it’s likely his Polish relations met a similar end at the hand of the Nazis. His most famous subject, a scrappy band of Gauls facing down an imperial war machine, was almost certainly influenced by the history of his people and of France during the war.
So it’s not surprising that this particular salute appeared in the early Asterix comics, as performed by the bad guys.
That the Romans are the ones performing it may bolster an erroneous impression that it has ties to antiquity (an excuse used in defense of Musk). In reality, it was another Frenchman, Jacques-Louis David, who introduced it in his 1784 Roman history painting Oath of the Horatii.
Truth be told, I’m conflicted about keeping the offending gesture. On the one hand, the show is a French production, and I think French children — and a lot of European ones — will recognize the salute from the comics.
I’d also hope they’d know better than to repeat it. Up until recently, the antisemitic French comic Dieudonné M’bala M’bala felt good taste behooved him to modify it into what he called a quenelle, which sees the stiff arm cross the chest to the opposite shoulder.
I’m not so sure the salute is still taboo in France, but at the very least its inclusion isn’t introducing the Gallic audience to something they haven’t seen before in an Asterix story.
But if the execrable American dub of the 1989 cartoon of Asterix and the Big Fight is any indication, youths here in the U.S. need a bit more hand-holding, not just for understanding the European tribal dynamics in 50 B.C.E., but to know that a Hitler salute is not Roman and not to be mimicked.
I have an idea to counter this moment’s worst effects. Given the series’ habit of breaking the fourth wall — or even the illusion of 3D animation — maybe it would be OK to add a, forgive me, asterisk a la “don’t try this at home.”
Better yet, we could have the narrator — whose name could be Expositionix — say “these characters were developed by a Jew with family killed in the Holocaust and immigrant Frenchman who lived through Nazi occupation and chose to depict this salute as a way to mock, not endorse, bigots.”
But perhaps I’m fretting over nothing. The Yankee Asterix audience seems to be pretty self-selecting and composed of young history nerds or kids forced to read the books in French class. If they want to see Nazi salutes, they can just log onto the internet.
Asterix gives the salute to wealthy bad guys and the underdogs fighting their meddling names with the letter “X.” Both should upset Elon Musk. My heart goes out to him.
