Bête et méchant: Politics, Editorial Cartoons and Bande dessinée in

Transcription

Bête et méchant: Politics, Editorial Cartoons
and Bande dessinée in the French Satirical
Newspaper Charlie hebdo
Jane Weston
Abstract
The weekly French satirical newspaper, Charlie hebdo, which originally ran from 1969
to 1982, pending a revival in 1992, distinguishes itself through its bête et méchant
[‘stupid and nasty’] humorous heritage, defined in its parent publication, Hara-Kiri,
as the freedom to make jokes on potentially any subject, however taboo. Whilst this
satirical ethos predominated in Charlie hebdo up to 1982, its enduring place in the
publication has become more ambiguous since 1992, with the abrupt sacking of Siné
in July 2008 seemingly belying its vigorous defence of provocative humour in the
context of the 2006 Danish caricature affair. An important underlying continuity
nonetheless remains in Charlie hebdo and transcends the bête et méchant project: that
of negotiating a space for satirical expression that has continuously engaged with
both elements of bande dessinée and the rich French tradition of polemical editorial
cartooning and caricature.
Single-panelled editorial cartooning,1 bande dessinée,2 and hybridisations of
the two have always coexisted in the French satirical newspaper Charlie hebdo
[‘Charlie Weekly’], both within its original format, which ran from 1969 to 1982,
and since its revival in 1992. One of the most important specificities of this
satirical weekly publication within the French humorous press is its association
with bête et méchant [‘stupid and nasty’] humour, the provocative satirical brand
of the group of humorists and cartoonists who first conceived of the term in the
early 1960s in the context of the monthly satirical magazine Hara-Kiri.3
Bête et méchant humour favoured scatology, sexually explicit material and
black humour in general. A key early example of such spirit was a parodical,
but genuine advertisement that appeared in Hara-Kiri mensuel in December
1 Editorial cartoons are defined for these purposes as single-framed cartoons intended to provide
some kind of commentary on real-life events.
2 Bande dessinée is defined here as extended, multi-panelled word-image narrative on a wide variety
of subject matter, fictional or otherwise.
3 The magazine first appeared in September 1960 as a ‘mensuel satirique’, changing to ‘mensuel
bête et méchant’ in May 1961.
European Comic Art 2.1 ISSN 1754-3797 (print) 1754-3800 (online) © Liverpool University Press
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1964 for Renoma, a Parisian tailor, which claimed that the shop had been a
former favourite of Hitler, who had bought all his favourite suits there. Whilst
this piece provoked violent protests by Jewish deportee groups, the journal’s
founder François Cavanna situates such humour within a serious justification
of the group’s ethos as a determinedly de-sacralising force:
Rien n’est sacré. Principe numéro un. Pas même ta propre mère, pas les martyrs
juifs, pas même ceux qui crèvent de faim… Rire de tout, de tout, férocement, amèrement, pour exorciser les vieux monstres. C’est leur faire trop d’honneur que de ne les
aborder qu’avec la mine compassée. C’est justement du pire qu’il faut rire le plus fort,
c’est là où ça te fait le plus mal que tu dois gratter au sang.
[‘Nothing is sacred. Principle number one. Not even your own mother, not the Jewish
martyrs, not even people starving of hunger… Laugh at everything, ferociously, bitterly,
to exorcise the old monsters. It would pay them too much respect only to approach
them with a straight face. It’s exactly about the worst things that you should laugh the
4
loudest, it’s where it hurts the most that you should scratch until it bleeds.’]
Defined as the freedom to laugh about potentially any subject, however taboo
or sensitive, bête et méchant humour was adopted from Hara-Kiri and predominant in the original Charlie hebdo up to 1982. In contrast, only an ever-diminishing echo of it has persisted since 1992, although it undeniably remains, as a
central tenet of Charlie hebdo’s original spirit, a key reference point in debates
surrounding the publication’s current satirical tone. Over the past 15 years,
the ongoing importance of bête et méchant humour in relation to Charlie hebdo
has been illustrated by the growing sense of betrayal expressed by a significant portion of its readership over its turn to an increasingly serious, and less
juvenile, satire, under the strong and autocratic editorship of Philippe Val.5
Under Val, the defence of a serious set of values has indeed far more explicitly
nourished the newspaper’s editorial line than was ever the case in the original
Charlie hebdo. In certain contexts it has chosen to place such concerns above
the perpetuation of bête et méchant humour, which tends to reject barriers to
provocation and jealously protect the freedom of contributors to take risks in
terms of their jokes, regardless of its potential to violate seriously held moral
convictions. The sacking in July 2008 of the long-standing contributor Siné for
his refusal to apologise for contributing jokes seen by some to leave the newspaper open to accusations of anti-Semitism illustrates how, at least in certain
contexts, the original profoundly libertarian tenets of the newspaper now take
4 François Cavanna, Bête et méchant (Paris: Belfond, 1982), 233.
5 Present-day contributor Charb stated, in interview, about the ethos in the new Charlie hebdo:
‘Méchant peut-être, bête de moins en moins. La nouvelle formule de Charlie, c’est moins des gags
ou des plaisanteries gratuites qu’avant […] c’est un peu plus prétentieux qu’avant, mais c’est aussi
plus politique, comme orientation’ [‘Nasty, perhaps, but less and less stupid. The new formula at
Charlie is fewer gratuitous gags and jokes than before […] it’s a little more pretentious before, but
it’s also a more political orientation’]. Interview of 29 January 2004.
Politics, Editorial Cartoons and Bande dessinée in Charlie hebdo
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second place to editorial prudence, even at the cost of alienating a portion of
its readership.6
An important counter-balance to such changes in the satirical ethos of Charlie
hebdo is the extent to which there is still aesthetic continuity with the original
publication. Beyond the presence of cartoonists from the original Charlie hebdo,
this is because it continues to foster the cross-pollination of elements of bande
dessinée and traditional editorial cartooning in its very distinctive house style.
This has, to an extent, offset its now frequently lacklustre engagement with
libertarian and provocative humour as a guarantor of continuity. It is, I shall
argue, the principal reason why today’s Charlie hebdo is still readily identifiable as a ‘spiritual’ successor to the original newspaper. It continues to engage
with current affairs through various forms of cartoon art. In this analysis, I
shall therefore examine the evolving role of bête et méchant humour in relation
to Charlie hebdo and its predecessor, Hara-Kiri, situating such changes in the
context of the ongoing opportunity it accords to its cartoonists: that of negotiating a space for satirical expression which has continuously engaged both with
bande dessinée and a rich French tradition of editorial cartooning and caricature
dating back to the nineteenth century.
The ‘Original’ Charlie hebdo: 1969–1981
Charlie hebdo was first published under the name of Hara-Kiri hebdo in 1969,
as a weekly supplement to the radically provocative satirical publication, HaraKiri, where bête et méchant was first created to label its satirical ethos. Hara-Kiri
was founded in large part through the efforts of François Cavanna, its editor
and major talent-spotter, and Georges Bernier, who was responsible for its sales
and distribution and who later became one of its emblematic and anarchic bête
et méchant humorists, under the pseudonym Le Professeur Choron. Cavanna’s
editorship served to nourish bête et méchant humour in Hara-Kiri, due to his
lucid instinct for how such humour could provide contributors and readers
alike with a source of illicit, carnivalesque pleasure where painful subjects
could be explored in a context of unusually high freedom from any imperatives
to take them seriously.7 Humour generally taboo in the press, like jokes on the
6 In an article in Le Monde of 22 August 2008 (‘De quoi Siné est-il le nom?’ [‘Of what is Siné the
Name?’]),Bernard-Henri Lévy presented Val’s decision as a response to a violation of the founding
pact of Charlie hebdo. The existence of any such pact refers to the new version of Charlie hebdo
rather than the original, which was never overtly explicit in terms of its prohibitions for humour:
‘Voilà un directeur – Philippe Val – qui rappelle au chroniqueur le pacte fondateur qu’est, pour
Charlie hebdo, leur journal, le refus catégorique de toute forme d’antisémitisme ou de racisme et
qui lui demande, en conséquence, de s’excuser ou de s’en aller’ [‘Here is a director – Philippe Val
– who reminds this contributor of the founding pact which is, for Charlie hebdo, the categorical
refusal of all forms of anti-Semitism or racism and which therefore asks him to apologise or to
leave’].
7 Cf. Cavanna’s autobiographical work, Bête et méchant.
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military, death and sexuality were therefore a staple in the magazine.
Hara-Kiri was above all created as a reaction against much of the popular
humorous post-war French press, with newspapers such as Marius, Le Hérisson
[‘The Hedgehog’] and L’Almanach Vermot being typical of the style rejected.9
Hara-Kiri sought to challenge thematic and aesthetic blandness with graphic
images, drawing on scatological, sexually explicit material and elements of the
grotesque. Its front cover photographs were exemplary in this respect, becoming
increasingly shocking and facetious as the decade progressed. An example of
such covers is a photograph of a naked woman wrapped in an enormous coil of
boudin (March 1966). Another (July 1965) had as its headline ‘Peut-on bronzer
sans soleil?’ (‘Can You Tan without the Sun?’): the woman smiles in the affirmative, posing on the beach with her back covered with blisteringly bright red
scalds from an iron.
Beyond the humorous press, post-war bande dessinée was another satirical
target of the group, owing to its entrenchment within the youth market in a
context of moral protectionism. Georges Wolinski, for example, contributed
an adult parody for Hara-Kiri of Tintin, ‘Tintin pour les dames’, featuring
drunkenness, licentiousness and a stubble-faced, motorbike riding, cigarettesmoking Tintin (July–August 1962). Cavanna was notably critical of post-war
bande dessinée, having worked as a children’s bande dessinée artist in the 1950s,
deeply regretting the moral sanitisation of the medium in the context of post-war
France:
L’heure était à la vertu, à la pureté, à la régénération. On traquait par-dessus tout la
‘vulgarité’ […] Le dessin pour enfants, pour tout petits enfants, ça ne comblait pas
mes appétits profanateurs. Il me piaffait dans le ventre des besoins d’énormes ricanements vengeurs, mes férocités me restaient sur les bras, […] je me voulais Rabelais, je
me voulais Ubu, et l’on me donnait à faire risette aux nourrissons.
[‘It was a time for virtue, purity and regeneration. Above all, it was “vulgarity” that was
hunted down […] Cartooning for very small children did not satisfy my profanatory
appetites. I craved great, vengeful sneering laughter, I had no outlet for my ferocities
[…] I wanted to be Rabelais, I wanted to be Ubu, and the only thing I was given to do
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was to keep young children smiling.’]
8 Contributor Gébé commented in interview (with Valérie Minerve Marin, June 2001) of bête et
méchant humour: ‘On abordait des sujets qui étaient totalement tabous dans la presse. Bon, le sexe
évidemment, mais aussi la mort, la religion, l’armée, tout ça.’ [‘We tackled subjects which were
completely taboo in the press. Sex, of course, but also death, religion, the military, all that’].
9 Humour in L’Almanach Vermot has been described as: ‘Plaisir du calembour exécrable [….] cet
humour continue imperturbablement à brocarder belles-mères et fonctionnaires, cocus et modernité.’ [‘Pleasure of the execrable pun […] this humour imperturbably continues to poke fun at
mothers-in-law and civil servants, cuckolds and modernity’]. See G. Verlant et al., L’Encyclopédie de
l’humour français: De 1900 à nos jours [‘The Encyclopaedia of French Humour: From 1900 to the
Present Day’] (Paris: Éditions Hors Collection, 2002), 17.
10 Cavanna, Bête et méchant, 35–36.
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Cavanna composed a team of contributors to Hara-Kiri who often had specialist
knowledge of bande dessinée, alongside that of caricature and cartooning culture
in general.11 A major shared inspiration at the outset was the anarchic humour
of Mad Magazine, and a key contribution of the group to the evolution of the
humorous press in France was to have introduced a publication to reflect a
comparable, or arguably even more radically abrasive, spirit to Mad. The group
moreover combined the anarchic spirit of Mad with that of the most violent
French Belle Époque caricature at the height of its popularity in L’Assiette au
beurre [‘The Butter Plate’], hence reawakening a dormant tradition. As Michel
Ragon points out:
De 1881 a 1914, les revues satiriques se multiplient: La Caricature en 1880, Le Rire en
1894, L’Assiette au beurre en 1910. La violence, atteinte aussi bien dans le graphisme
que dans l’expression, fait de cette période l’âge d’or de la caricature. Il faudra attendre
les années 1960/70 pour que la caricature retrouve la vigueur, la force contestataire
des années dites de la Belle Époque. De l’Assiette au beurre à Hara-Kiri et à Charlie
hebdo, l’esprit est le même, superbement retrouvé après un entracte plutôt fade d’une
cinquantaine d’années.
[‘From 1881 to 1914 there were ever-greater numbers of satirical magazines: La Caricature in 1880, Le Rire [‘Laughter’] in 1894, L’Assiette au beurre in 1910. The violence of
its graphic style and expression made this period the golden age of caricature. Only in
the 1960s and 1970s did caricature regain the vigour and adversarial power of these
Belle Époque years. The spirit of L’Assiette au beurre, Hara-Kiri and Charlie hebdo was
12
the same, superbly revived after a rather insipid 50-year interval.’]
Hara-Kiri served as a training ground for Charlie hebdo’s subsequent cartoonbased artwork, consisting of elements of single-panelled and strip cartoons,
bande dessinée, photo-montage, short humorous prose and home-made parodies
in the style of Mad. Material was deliberately diverse, but it usually converged
in terms of the bête et méchant themes discussed above. There was no editorial
cartooning, however, given that Hara-Kiri eschewed direct engagement with
politics and current affairs. Nonetheless, the audacity of its sexually explicit and
amoral tone in the context of Gaullist France made it subject to government
censorship on two occasions in the 1960s.13 In both instances this arose on the
grounds of representing a danger under the July 1949 law for the protection
of youth morality. The second 1966 ban, largely ignored in the press, elicited
support in the form of a petition from various cultural heavy-weights such as
Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Further signatories included Louis
11 Major contributors to Hara-Kiri who went on to contribute to Charlie hebdo included Reiser,
Bernier, Cabu, Wolinski, Gébé, and later Willem, Fournier and Siné. Fred and Topor were both
major contributors to Hara-Kiri but left the group before the creation of Charlie hebdo.
12 Michel Ragon, ‘Antimilitarisme et caricature’, preface to Où vas-tu petit soldat? À l’abattoir! [‘Where
are you Going Little Soldier? To the Slaughterhouse!’] (Paris: Éditions du Monde Libertaire,
1989).
13 The first ban fell in July 1961 and lasted until November 1961; the second fell in May 1966 and was
lifted in January 1967.
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Aragon, Jean-Christophe Averty, Francis Blanche, Jean Effel, Robert Escarpit,
Edgar Morin, Raymond Queneau, Alain Resnais and Sempé.
Such endorsement illustrated the capacity of bête et méchant humour in HaraKiri to resonate with prominent left-wing French intellectuals, despite its crudeness and the cruelty of much of it, frequently targeting as it did the weak and
disadvantaged in society without apparent remorse. The nature of the support
they received from such figures suggested that a degree of intellectual cachet
had been successfully grafted onto the magazine, with bête et méchant humour
implicitly inviting connoisseurs of avant-garde humour to demonstrate engagement with such material as advanced irony and ‘hygienic’ black humour, rather
than interpreting it as first-degree stupidity and nastiness.14 Bête et méchant
humour indeed conveyed a spirit which in some ways resonated with the existentialist movement, with its rejection of notions of the sacred, and implied
radical doubt as to the validity of the value-based assumptions nourishing the
foundations of morally conservative sensibilities. Bernier is cited by Jean-Marc
Parisis in interview:
J’ai découvert, longtemps après, qu’on était tous complètement agnostiques dans la
bande. On ne croyait en rien, on n’avait aucun tabou, on se foutait de notre propre
gueule, de tout le monde. On se marrait de la mort. On ne s’est pas convaincus les
uns les autres, ça s’est fait tout seul.
[‘I found out much later that we were all completely agnostic in the group. We didn’t
believe in anything, we had no taboo, we took the piss out of ourselves, out of everybody. We laughed about death. We didn’t convince each other, it happened on its
15
own.’]
It was the events of May 1968 that served to push the group into more directly
politically relevant satirical material, inaugurating a new engagement with
editorial cartooning. The spontaneous success of May 1968 publications such
as Action and L’Enragé and their striking visual components, to which many
of the Hara-Kiri cartoonists such as Wolinski and Cabu contributed, indicated
the extent to which topical political publications with visual satirical elements
were now well placed to attract the endorsement of a large readership. HaraKiri hebdo was therefore launched in 1969 with the aim of meeting the new
priorities of the readers. Odile Vaudelle, Bernier’s long-term girlfriend, recalls
the importance of the 1968 events and the influence of the publications they
spawned:
L’Enragé n’a vécu que le temps des événements, mais il a prouvé à Cavanna, à Choron,
et à toute la bande, qu’un journal collant à l’actualité, vite fait, imprimé à la diable,
avec de petits moyens, non seulement était réalisable, mais avait un public.
14 Hara-Kiri fostered its association with a prestigious black humorous lineage in 1964 by featuring
a ‘Guide Michelin’ of good quality humour, citing such authors as Cami, Ambrose Bierce, Tristan
Bernard, Roald Dahl, Boris Vian, Alphose Allais, Groucho Marx, Jonathan Swift and Saki.
15 Jean-Marc Parisis, Reiser (Paris: Grasset, 2003), 57.
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[‘L’Enragé only lasted for the period of the events, but it proved to Cavanna, Choron
and all the group, that a newspaper dealing with current affairs that was quickly put
together and printed at top speed without much funding was not only possible, but
16
was in demand.’]
Alongside this expansion into topical political cartooning, the group consolidated its links to bande dessinée through the creation of Charlie mensuel, which
was modelled on the Italian adult bande dessinée magazine Linus and which
looked to import previously ignored bande dessinée into France for the first time,
as well as printing the work of bête et méchant cartoonists. Charlie mensuel was
significant as the first major bande dessinée magazine specifically for adults in
France.17 Hara-Kiri’s cartoonists were able to expand both into bande dessinée for
adults for publication in Charlie mensuel, and into militant editorial cartooning
for Hara-Kiri hebdo. Their renewal with the spirit of the anarchic caricature of
the Belle Époque thus went hand in hand with making inroads into a rapidly
evolving bande dessinée market, with its new emphasis on adult material. There
was therefore a particularly strong basis for cross-fertilisation between the
genres in their work, as reflected in the pages of Charlie hebdo.
The turn to politics and current affairs in Hara-Kiri hebdo and the launch of
Charlie mensuel as a specialised bande dessinée publication came at the vanguard
of the wider shift in post-68 France where commercially oriented cartooning
became increasingly liberated in tone, embracing politics and sexuality and
other primarily ‘adult’ topics, as the publishing repressions of post-war concern
for youth purity were swept away. Many of the Hara-Kiri group became explicitly politically engaged in their work for the first time as a result of May 68,
linking their provocative humour to the spirit of the movement with an increasingly sincere militancy that had previously been absent in Hara-Kiri, in the
context of a highly morally conservative society.18 Such concern to take full
advantage of the changed spirit of the early 1970s was undoubtedly fuelled
16 Odile Vaudelle and Christian Bobet, Moi, Odile, la femme à Choron: La petite histoire de Hara-Kiri
et Charlie hebdo [‘Me, Odile, Wife of Choron: The Tale of Hara-Kiri and Charlie hebdo’] (Paris:
Menges, 1983), 153.
17 As Ratier argues, ‘Cette période va donc permettre l’éclosion de la BD dite pour adultes. Si V Magazine, Hara-Kiri et Pilote en sont les parrains, le premier père spirituel est Charlie mensuel’ [‘This
period thus marked the blossoming of so-called adult bande dessinée. If V Magazine, Hara-Kiri and
Pilote were its godfathers, its first spiritual father was Charlie mensuel’]. See Gilles Ratier, Avant
la case: Histoire de la bande dessinée francophone du XXe siècle racontée par des scénaristes [‘Before
the Frame: The History of the Twentieth-Century French-Language Comic Strip as Told by the
Writers’] (Paris: PLG, 2002), 63.
18 Wolinski commented of his experiences of May 68: ‘Moi, j’y croyais sincèrement et je m’amusais
en même temps. Il y avait un vent de liberté, d’utopie et d’humour dans tout ça. Les affiches étaient
belles, c’était très excitant, les rues, les barricades. Je ne croyais pas qu’il existait une jeunesse aussi
sensible aux injustices d’une société vieillissante’ [‘I believed in it sincerely and I had fun at the
same time. There was a wave of freedom, utopia and humour in it all. The posters were beautiful,
it was very exciting, the streets, the barricades. I didn’t believe that young people were so sensitive
to the injustices of an aging society’]. See Laurence Garcia and Cabu, Cabu 68 (Paris: Actes Sud,
2008), 56.
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by their anger over earlier governmental censorship of Hara-Kiri. Hara-Kiri
hebdo therefore brought bête et méchant spirit into the militant political arena,
where in the words of Jean-Marc Parisis, the following ethos prevailed: ‘Tous
les camps sont pourris, sauf le leur. Le camp de l’humour brutal, de la dérision
absolue, choquante, hygiénique. Le camp des hommes détestant les camps,
l’information, la publicité’ [‘All sides are corrupt, except theirs. The side of
brutal, absolute, shocking and hygienic humour. The side taken by people who
hate taking sides, who hate the news and advertising’].19
Hara-Kiri hebdo was subject to debate in the media for the first time when
it notoriously greeted the death of General de Gaulle in 1969 with the bald
headline: ‘Bal tragique à Colombey: 1 mort’ [‘Tragic Dance at Colombey: One
Death’]. The headline cross-referenced the tragic events of a few weeks previously, in which over 40 young people had been killed at a fire in a discotheque
at Saint-Laurent-du-Pont. It was Georges Bernier who thought of the headline.
Such a front-page cover was unusual, its lack of cartoon making it a somewhat
ironic point of singular notoriety for the humour of a group whose work was
usually so entrenched in cartooning. Within a week of the headline, the newspaper was banned by the Interior Minister, Raymond Marcelin, putatively on
the grounds of pornographic content but, as was widely acknowledged elsewhere in the press, in retribution for the ‘bal tragique’ headline.
The censorship was universally condemned in the press, regardless of the
reservations of certain newspapers such as France-Soir about the quality or
acceptability of bête et méchant humour in general.20 This support emboldened
the group to face the small but real risk of imprisonment and they immediately relaunched the publication under the new title of Charlie hebdo, dated
23 November 1970. This adaptation of the bande dessinée magazine’s title was
again illustrative of how bande dessinée and bête et méchant satire intermingled
in the context of the group’s ongoing projects. The first issue of Charlie hebdo
indeed featured a cartoon strip from Peanuts, which continued Charlie mensuel’s introduction of Schulz’s work into France, but this series was discontinued
in Charlie hebdo when it became apparent that the newspaper would be tolerated, despite being a revamped Hara-Kiri in all but name. There was therefore
no need to present itself as a weekly supplement to Charlie mensuel with a new
emphasis on bande dessinée imports.
With Hara-Kiri hebdo renamed as Charlie hebdo, the publicity coup of the
19 Jean-Marc Parisis, Reiser, 55.
20 France-Soir (19 November 1970) commented: ‘Quels que puissent être les motifs des mesures frappant Hara-Kiri, France-Soir qui a été souvent victime de l’esprit bête et méchant de cette publication,
ne peut que déplorer ces mesures […] La liberté de la presse est un bloc. Elle impose qu’on accepte
la licence, la stupidité, la malhonnêteté intellectuelle’ [‘Whatever the motives might be for the
measures taken against Hara-Kiri, France-Soir, which has often fallen victim to the bête et méchant
spirit of the publication, can only deplore these measures […] The freedom of the press exists as a
block. It demands that we accept licentiousness, stupidity and intellectual dishonesty’].
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‘bal tragique’ dramatically boosted readership numbers, and the first half of
the 1970s marked a period of rapid expansion of Bernier’s Paris-based parent
publishing company, Les Éditions du Square, with compilations of the work of
individual bête et méchant contributors being published in album format as part
of the Série bête et méchante.21 Meanwhile Charlie hebdo consistently featured
elements of bande dessinée, conventional editorial cartooning, longer texts and
hybrids of these elements. This style contrasted with the largely text-dominated
format of its distant weekly satirical rival, Le Canard enchaîné,22 which had
continued to perpetuate the turn away from caricature to text-based satirical
material in the topical satirical press from its creation in 1915.23
Bête et méchant humour as it had existed in Hara-Kiri resonated reasonably
well with Charlie hebdo’s post-68 readership in the early 1970s, but contributors were also sensitive to the readership demand for a more positive political
engagement through a form of less satirically destructive material.24 The work
of Gébé in Charlie hebdo is exemplary in this respect, and was also stylistically
innovative by the way it favoured a loosely framed bande dessinée-esque format,
within which long textual elements intermingled with a diffuse visual narrative with no strict order being determined for the reading of the page. In the
series L’An 01 [‘Year 01’],25 he created a utopian project calling for society to put
a temporary end to traditional employment structures, to allow for prolonged
critical reflection over more meaningful and pleasurable ways of living for
the future. Such work became emblematic of the new politicised use of bande
dessinée-related pieces in Charlie hebdo.
Beyond L’An 01, another important example of politically engaged bande
dessinée in Charlie hebdo was the work of Cabu, who put satirical commentary to the purpose of investigative reporting, creating a series of BD-reportages
on his travels around France, where he would undertake investigative work
21 Examples of albums produced by Les Éditions du Square at the time include Cabu’s Les Aventures
de Madame Pompidou (1973), Cavanna’s L’Aurore de l’humanité: Et le singe devint con [‘The Dawn of
Humanity: And the Monkey Became an Arsehole’] (1972), Gébé’s Il est fou [‘He’s Mad’] (1971) and
Reiser’s La Vie des bêtes [‘The Life of Dumb Animals’] (1974).
22 Literally ‘The Chained Duck’, the title is a play on ‘canard’ as slang for ‘newspaper’.
23 See A. Ziv, ed., National Styles of Humor (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1988). See in particular page
75.
24 Parisis indeed goes as far as to argue: ‘Les idées de Mai ont affranchi les anciens lecteurs du
journal, créé une nouvelle demande que la ligne dure bête et méchant du mensuel ne peut satisfaire.
Pour les lycéens, les étudiants, les profs dessalés, les communautaires, les cadres progressistes
ou révolutionnaires, enfin le vivier de marginaux et de travailleurs intellectuels qui constituait la
majeure partie du lectorat d’Hara-Kiri, l’heure est à la recherche de nouvelles formes de vie, au
travail du réel’ [‘The ideas of May emancipated the old readers of the newspapers, creating a new
demand that the hard bête et méchant line could not satisfy. For the high school students, university students, demystified teachers, the communitarians, the progressive or revolutionary cadre,
indeed the stock of outsiders and intellectual workers which made up the major part of Hara-Kiri’s
readership, the time had come to search for new ways of life, to try and change reality’]. See Parisis,
Reiser, 99.
25 Gébé, L’An 01 (Paris: Éditions du Square, 1972).
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at the invitation of readers. Contributions such as this from the early 1970s
mark some of the earliest examples in France of bande dessinée as documentary
and as personal testimony, although Cabu rarely represented himself directly
within his work, other than within the textual narrative of the pieces. A notable
example of Cabu’s approach was a piece on slum clearance problems in Nice
that appeared in Charlie hebdo of 25 June 1973. Shocked by what he saw, and
determined to report the extent of the squalor, he attacked the mayor of the
city, Jacques Médecin, for corruption and his failure to address the problem.
Condemning Médecin for giving higher priority to municipal projects such
as city beautification, he reported on how these were often used to conceal
the ever-increasing number of parking meters in the city, which were being
installed by a company in which Médecin’s wife was a major shareholder.
Médecin sued Cabu for 210,000 francs for these corruption allegations. Cabu
lost the case but received a fine of only 300 francs, rather than the sum originally demanded. Such cases illustrated the capacity of bande dessinée in Charlie
hebdo to provoke controversy and to militate for change. Cabu was particularly
concerned to be perceived as a serious journalist and commentator, rather than
simply a provocative humorist, although remaining loyal to the tenets of bête et
méchant humour.27
Such work in Charlie hebdo often reflected a degree of creative hybridisation
between bande dessinée and single-panelled editorial cartooning. For instance, in
elements of the work of Reiser and Cabu, rather than creating multiple panels,
they would often convey complex narrative in multi-layered, fluid stages within
a large single panel sometimes taking up a whole page. Cabu comments on
the difference between this style, pure bande dessinée and traditional editorial
cartoons, situating the origins of such work in Hara-Kiri:
Reiser parlait à propos de nos styles de dessin séquencé. C’est une manière de jouer
de l’espace bien plus libre et surtout définitivement en rupture avec les canons ou
dessins humoristiques ou même ceux de la BD. Cela vient de ‘Hara-Kiri’ où nous
voulions nous exprimer avec une écriture, un langage différents, sorte de contrepoint
à notre humour noir et incisif.
[‘Reiser referred to our styles as sequenced cartoons. It was a much freer way to play
with space and, above all, definitively a break from the canons of humorous cartooning
or even bande dessinée. It started with Hara-Kiri, where we wanted to express ourselves
28
with a kind of writing, a sort of counterpoint to our black, cutting humour.’]
26 See the interview with Cabu published in this issue of European Comic Art.
27 In Le Figaro of 22 May 1973 Cabu defined his position as follows: ‘Je cherche à faire rire tout
d’abord, mais je suis un journaliste politique. Je fais mon métier de dessinateur. Je ne m’attaque
pas à une personne, mais à ce qu’elle représente. À Charlie hebdo, on cherche à faire reculer les
limites du bon goût, qui est une notion bourgeoise dont on n’a que faire. Il faut secouer les gens,
il faut dire les choses’ [‘I try to make people laugh first and foremost, but I am a political journalist.
I carry out my trade as a cartoonist. I don’t attack individuals, but what they represent. At Charlie
hebdo, we try to push back the limits of good taste, which is a bourgeois notion we couldn’t care
less about. You have to shake people up, you have to say things’].
28 Cabu, Cabu et Paris (Paris: Connaissance des Arts Hors Série, 2006), 11.
119
More traditional single-panelled dessin de presse also featured greatly in
Charlie hebdo, however, and whilst such work marked a departure from HaraKiri, it harked back to a more traditional form of caricature dating from the
nineteenth century,29 capitalising on the editorial punch of such single-panelled
pieces, which would often convey some of the newspaper’s bluntest messages.
Favoured topics included the defence of the environment, anti-militarism,
the ridicule of religion, and animal rights issues. Charlie hebdo’s front covers
particularly revived the pamphleteering force of the genre as had previously
existed in publications such as L’ Assiette au beurre.30 Blunt messages conveyed
as headlines to its editorial cartoons included: ‘Votez con, vous n’avez pas le
choix’ [‘Vote like an Arsehole, You Don’t Have a Choice’] (15 March 1971); ‘La
Lune, on s’en fout!’ [‘We Don’t Give a Damn about the Moon’] (21 July 1969);
and ‘Chasseurs = sales cons’ [‘Hunters = Dirty Arseholes’] (13 September 1971).
The unusually strong impact of this revived aesthetic of editorial cartooning
was felt on various occasions when its insolence leaked beyond the pages of the
newspaper. For instance, two weeks after a cartoon by Wolinski representing
Michel Debré as a madman with a funnel on his head, frothing at the mouth
(Charlie hebdo 20 November 1972), there was a demonstration of over 200,000
people in Paris against Debré, where large numbers of participants marched
with funnels on their heads in reference to the gag.31
The freedom of tone and of style accorded to contributors to Charlie hebdo
served as inspiration for subsequent bande dessinée-related publications,
including L’Écho des Savanes from 1972. Competition from the publication,
however, contributed to the reduced demand for Hara-Kiri and Charlie hebdo,
although it also provided some bête et méchant contributors with a new forum
for their work. Bernier later wrote bitterly:
L’arrivée de L’Écho des Savanes coïncide avec la chute de Hara-Kiri. Pourquoi? Parce
que le lecteur est un enfoiré, un infidèle. C’est toujours la recherche de la nouveauté.
Donc est arrivé L’Echo des Savanes, et qu’est-ce qu’ils ont trouvé dedans? Wolinski.
Reiser.
[‘The arrival of L’Écho des Savanes coincided with the fall of Hara-Kiri. Why? Because
readers are unfaithful scoundrels. Always looking for novelty. So L’Echo des Savanes
32
turned up and what did they find in it? Wolinski. Reiser.]’
Moreover, the editorial cartooning of the group came to be in demand by
non-satirical publications, such as Le Nouvel Observateur (Reiser) or Paris-Match
29 Examples of journals featuring such caricature are La Caricature, Le Charivari and the later L’Assiette
au beurre.
30 The front covers of Charlie hebdo most commonly featured a single editorial cartoon which was
selected each week by the whole team, with the week’s other editorial cartoons being published
under a separate section entitled ‘Les Couvertures auxquelles vous avez échappé’ [‘The Covers You
Missed Out On’].
31 Cf. Odile Vaudelle, Moi, Odile, la femme à Choron, 192.
32 Georges Bernier [Le Professeur Choron], Vous me croirez si vous voulez [‘It’s Up to You Whether
You Believe Me’] (Paris: Flammarion, 1993), 190.
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jane weston
and L’Humanité (Wolinski). Charlie hebdo continued only until January 1982,
due to falling readership numbers and the mounting debts of Les Éditions
du Square, which had overextended itself and which was fatally hampered
by Bernier’s casual accountancy, which he concealed until it was too late for
anyone else to do anything about it.33 Charlie hebdo also failed because its bête et
méchant comic spirit lost its original novelty value in the absence of the morally
restrictive, taboo-ridden publishing context of its origins. This was discussed in
depth in January 1982 on TF1 in Michel Polac’s Droit de réponse [‘Right to Reply’]
dedicated to the newspaper’s demise.34 One invited guest, the journalist and
author Dominique Jamet indeed argued:
Charlie hebdo a été un très, très grand journal […] Charlie hebdo, comme Hara-Kiri,
a gagné la célébrité lorsqu’il a été censuré, après le fameux titre […] C’était l’époque
héroïque de Charlie hebdo, c’était une époque où il y’avait censure et barrières. Et
lorsque nous sommes entrés dans une époque où ces tabous n’étaient plus interdits,
Charlie hebdo a enfoncé des portes ouvertes.
[‘Charlie hebdo was a very great publication […] Charlie hebdo, like Hara-Kiri, became
famous once it had been censored after the famous headline […] It was Charlie hebdo’s
heroic period, it was a period when there was censorship and barriers. And when we
reached the period when these taboos were no longer forbidden, Charlie hebdo broke
35
down open doors’].
The newspaper thus ultimately failed to renew itself sufficiently in a changed
societal context. Moreover, the consensus was that Charlie hebdo was no longer
fashionable in the eyes of a new, younger generation, who no longer felt
connected to the 68 protest movement, and who found the newspaper’s irreverent spirit increasingly available elsewhere in the media, for instance even in
the style of Libération.36 However, the outpouring of protest from readers at its
disbanding indeed indicated a continued demand for its material, and highlighted the extent to which the newspaper was still valued by many, even if they
no longer always regularly purchased it. Jean-François Kahn provided a fitting
tribute to the newspaper’s impact in January 1981:
Charlie hebdo, ça a quand même été un événement. On aime, on aime pas, on a pu
être choqué, parfois […] mais on ne peut pas nier que ça a été un événement dans la
33 See Cavanna in Cabu 68, 56.
34 The programme gained a notoriety of its own as a result of its drunken participants coming to
blows.
35 Droit de réponse, TF1, 2 January 1982.
36 Bernier comments: ‘Et s’amène le quotidien Libération. On lui avait montré la voie. Il s’est mis
à faire quotidiennement ce que faisait Charlie hebdo. Il donnait les informations parallèles qu’on
avait l’habitude de donner. Ils ont carrément piqué le ton d’insolence, même certains titres de
rubriques […] Libération nous a vraiment aidé à crever!’ [‘Then there was Libération. We had cleared
a path for it. It began to do every day what Charlie hebdo did. It gave out the parallel information we
were used to giving. They completely stole the insolent tone, even the titles of some columns […]
Libération really helped kill us off’]. See Georges Bernier [Le Professeur Choron], Vous me croirez
si vous voulez, 185.
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presse et dans le temps, que Charlie hebdo apportait une façon différente de parler des
choses, on n’osait pas parler d’une certain manière ou de dire des choses sur certains
événements, sur certaines personnes, sur certaines valeurs.
[‘Charlie hebdo was certainly significant. You can like it or not, you can be shocked
sometimes […] but you can’t deny that it was significant in the press and in its time,
that Charlie hebdo brought a different way of speaking about things, people didn’t dare
to speak in a certain way or to say things about certain events, or certain people, or
37
certain values.’]
The ‘New’ Charlie hebdo: 1992–the Present Day
Charlie hebdo was relaunched in 1992 under Philippe Val’s editorship.38 The
relaunch owed a certain amount to chance, alongside the concerted willpower
of a core group which included many members of the original bête et méchant
team, but with Cavanna now only one of the contributors, rather than the editor.
The revival of Charlie hebdo was certainly not a foregone conclusion, but was
the consequence of Val breaking away from the satirical publication La Grosse
Bertha [‘Big Bertha’], accompanied by contributors to the new Charlie hebdo.39
There was widespread interest at the outset from former readers of Charlie
hebdo, nostalgic for the provocative excesses of the original bête et méchant
project.40 Charlie hebdo was fortunate once again to attract a full team of cartoonists, as well as the additional collaboration of the left-wing singer-songwriter,
Renaud. Previous contributors to Charlie hebdo who returned to collaborate
with Val included Cavanna, Cabu, Gébé, Wolinski, Willem and Siné. Bernier
was a notable exception, however, as he was not approached as a collaborator
and remained estranged from the newspaper up to his death in 2005.41 This in
part indicated the incompatibility of Bernier with Val, who very quickly established himself at the head of the publication with a degree of authority that had
37 On Midi 2, France 2, 3 January 1982.
38 Val was originally a chansonnier who rose to prominence in the 1970s as part of a successful comic
musical duo with Patrick Font, Font et Val, before turning to journalism, contributing notably to
Libération at the beginning of the 1990s, where he met Cabu.
39 Val co-founded La Grosse Bertha in 1991 with Jean-Cyrille Godefroy, on the single issue of attacking
the first Gulf War.
40 In an article entitled ‘Cabu et Val: Duettistes’ that appeared in Le Nouvel Observateur of 13 August
2008, Delfeil de Ton comments on the instant success of the revived title of Charlie hebdo: ‘Sur
la légende du titre, les annonces partout dans la presse, le 20-heures de TF1, etc., 150.000 exemplaires du premier numéro vendus, 200.000, je ne sais. C’est la valeur patrimoniale du titre qui
fait le succès immédiat. Pas eu besoin de dépenser un sou et de quoi déjà tenir des mois’ [‘On the
back of the legend of the title, announcements were made in the press, on the TF1 8pm news, etc.,
150,000 copies were sold of the first issue, or even 200,000, I don’t know. It was the patrimonial
value of the title that made for its immediate success. No need to invest a penny and already there
was enough to last months’].
41 The title Charlie hebdo had never been officially declared under Bernier’s name, despite his former
position as director of Hara-Kiri and Charlie hebdo. He unsuccessfully sued for the rights in 1993,
which were attributed by the judge to Cavanna.
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jane weston
not existed in the original, consciously egalitarian, editorial structure of Charlie
hebdo.42
The continued importance within Charlie hebdo of bande dessinée, editorial cartooning and the hybridisation of these was apparent from the outset,
although lengthier editorials also became a more dominant feature of the new
publication. Various younger cartoonists were key to the new team, including
Charb, Luz, Tignous, Jul, Honoré and, since 2004, the first female cartoonist,
Catherine. These contributors nonetheless often cite the older members and the
bête et méchant ethos as a key inspiration for their work. For instance, Tignous
told me in interview:
Je suis un fils spirituel de Hara-Kiri, de Charlie d’avant, forcément. Mais au même
titre que La Gueule ouverte, de Siné massacre, de L’Énragé, enfin de toute cette génération. Enfin de tous les gens qui ont essayé de faire passer une idée à travers la blague.
Pas seulement à faire: ‘ha ha ha’, et puis, rien.
[‘I am a spiritual son of Hara-Kiri, of the old Charlie, definitely. In the same way as La
Gueule ouverte [‘The Open Mouth’], Siné massacre, L’Enragé, of that whole generation.
All those people who tried to convey ideas through their jokes, not simply to make
43
people laugh, and then nothing.’]
The layout of the new Charlie hebdo up to 2005 was very similar to the original.
Many contributors were allocated a regular slot in the newspaper to fill as they
pleased, with the remainder of the space being shared by its journalists and
used for collaborative pieces. It also regularly included full- or even double-page
cartoon ‘frescos’ on a given theme from the week’s news, conveying numerous
humorous mini-narratives within the wide optic of the single frame. The work
of the cartoonist Luz was often printed in such a format.44 Luz also moved into
bande dessinée proper via the production of fanzines, after which he published
the autobiographical piece, Cambouis, documenting his experiences of the
aftermath of Jean-Marie Le Pen reaching the second round of the 2002 presidential elections.45
From 2005, Charlie hebdo introduced the use of multiple colours within the
same edition for the first time, which favoured a move to a more modern, bande
dessinée inclusive format. It also took the step of inviting new contributors from
42 In a Télérama article of 24 July 2008 (‘L’Honneur perdu de Charlie hebdo’ [‘Charlie hebdo’s Lost
Honour’]) Stéphane Mazurier writes critically of the change in ethos this brought to the newspaper: ‘Aujourd’hui, il y a bien un chef, c’est Philippe Val et personne d’autre. Et alors? […] Le
problème est précisément que Charlie hebdo ne devrait pas être un journal comme les autres, qu’il
a été fondé il y a près de 40 ans pour proposer autre chose que la presse traditionnelle’ [‘Today,
there is clearly a boss, it’s Philippe Val and no one else… So what? […] The problem is precisely that
Charlie hebdo should not be just another newspaper, it was founded nearly 40 years ago to offer an
alternative to the traditional press’].
43 Interview with Tignous, 29 January 2004.
44 In interview Luz told me that he found that he preferred such a style, alongside a bande dessinée, to
the simple editorial cartoon, which did not allow him sufficiently to convey the complexity of his
responses to political events (interview of 29 January 1994).
45 Luz, Cambouis (Paris: L’Association, 2002).
123
bande dessinée, such as Joann Sfar, who contributed from 2005 to 2006 with a
column entitled Mon Cahier d’éveil [‘My Early-Learning Notebook’], where he
presented his thoughts on the week’s events in a fluid, single-panelled format
similar to that pioneered by Reiser and Cabu. Since 2006, Riad Sattouf has
also contributed a weekly strip, entitled La Vie des jeunes [‘The Lives of Young
People’], where he presents anecdotes of everyday, yet incongruous and sociologically disturbing occurrences involving young people witnessed over the
previous week.
Charlie hebdo cartoonist Riss has spanned the traditional dessin de presse,
bande dessinée and hybrids of these in his published work in the newspaper. As
well as producing punchy editorial cartoons, which are frequently selected for
the front cover, he has moved into creating often grotesque cartoon ‘frescos’ for
the newspaper, as well as branching into bande dessinée. Most notably, in 2006
he worked alongside Charlie hebdo’s lawyer, Richard Malka, and the investigative journalist, Philippe Cohen, to produce what was announced as ‘la première
BD-enquête’ [‘The First Investigative Journalism in BD’], which presented the
background to the political rise of Nicolas Sarkozy, starting from his childhood,
in La Face karchée de Sarkozy,46 and enjoying commercial and critical success. A
follow-up, entitled Nicolas 1er, was published in 2007,47 and in November 2008
the group published a new BD-enquête, still on Nicolas Sarkozy and with the
addition of his wife, Carla Bruni: Carla et Carlito.48
Following the example of George Bernier’s Les Éditions du Square, Charlie
hebdo has regularly produced compilations of the work of its cartoonists, as
well as thematic compilations, published by its parent publishing company,
Les Éditions Rotative. These have included the multi-volume autobiography
of Siné,49 which took the same format as his regular column in Charlie hebdo
up to July 2007, Siné sème sa zone [‘Siné Spreads Havoc’], a hybrid of political
cartooning and written editorial, in which his editorial commentaries are handwritten, and columns are drawn by hand with cartoons interspersed, around
which his texts are arranged.
Published thematic compilations based on work in Charlie hebdo have
included ones on the subject of the Pope (Les Années Jean-Paul II [‘The JeanPaul II Years’]),50 and Chirac (La Success story du président).51 In September 2008,
46 Philippe Cohen, Richard Malka and Riss, La Face karchée de Sarkozy (Paris: Vents d’Ouest/Fayard,
2006). The title is a play on ‘the hidden side of Sarkozy’ [‘face cachée’] and a reference to the highpowered Karcher hoses with which Sarkozy suggested that a tough working-class housing estate
might be cleaned.
47 Philippe Cohen, Richard Malka and Riss, Nicolas 1er (Paris: Éditions Rotative, 2007).
48 Philippe Cohen, Richard Malka and Riss, Carla et Carlito (Paris: Vents d’Ouest/Fayard, 2008).
49 Siné, Ma Vie, mon oeuvre, mon cul! [‘My Life, My Work, My Arse’] (Paris: Les Éditions Rotative,
1999).
50 Riss, ed., Charlie hebdo présente les années Jean-Paul II (Paris: Hoëbeke, 2005).
51 Cabu, Charb, Gébé, Honoré, Jul, Luz, Riss, Tignous, Willem and Wolinski, La Success story du
président (Paris: Hoëbeke, 2006).
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the group launched a further publishing house, Éditions Les Échappés. This
publishing house represents an exciting new development, as announced on
its newly launched website in September 2008:
Afin de poursuivre le travail au-delà de l’actualité hebdomadaire, Les Échappés publieront des BD politiques, des reportages écrits ou dessinés, des chroniques, des enquêtes,
et éditeront aussi des dessins de presse. Le programme des parutions comportera
archives et créations originales.
[‘In order to continue its work beyond weekly current affairs, Les Échappés [‘The
Escapees’] will publish political bande dessinée, written or drawn reporting, chronicles, investigative reporting, and will also edit editorial cartoons. The publishing
52
programme will include archive material and original creations.’]
Meanwhile, Charlie hebdo has continued the tradition of printing eyecatching, and frequently provocative, front-page covers featuring a single largescale editorial cartoon. One of its most striking (12 November 2001), with a bête
et méchant edge, was a front page cartoon by Cabu in response to the terrorist
attacks of 11 September 2001, which illustrated the newspaper’s continued
predilection for irreverence bordering on bad taste. It featured a stockbroker in
one of the Trade Center towers watching one of the aeroplanes heading for his
window whilst shouting into his telephone: ‘Vendez!’ [‘Sell!’]. The fact that the
newspaper was willing to print this in the direct aftermath of the event situates
it within a mode of humour that is usually only found in informal, anonymous
contexts, such as drinking venues or on the internet, as explored by sociologist
Elliott Oring.53
Charlie hebdo has been subject to numerous trials in the context of its
cartooning, the majority of which it has won, which was not the case with the
original Charlie hebdo and Hara-Kiri.54 In December 1996 , however, it did lose
a case on appeal, over a cartoon by Riss that had used illustrations to encourage
those against the Pope’s policies on contraception and abortion to defecate
in the fonts of their local churches. Despite this kind of provocative humour,
the present-day Charlie hebdo is primarily committed to the defence, through
provocative satire, of a number of serious values, including that of laïcité. Val
has explicitly defined these as follows:
Il n’y a pas de controverse sur la ligne éditoriale. Celle-ci n’est d’ailleurs pas une
ligne, mais une charte générale édictée par François Cavanna, le fondateur du journal.
Il y fait obligation d’être fidèle à la laïcité, à la défense de l’écologie, aux principes
démocratiques, aux idéaux des Lumières, aux droits de l’Homme, à la lutte contre le
racisme et l’antisémitisme et à la dénonciation de la cruauté contre les animaux.
52 Source: http://www.charliehebdo.fr (accessed 1 March 2009).
53 Elliott Oring, Jokes and their Relations (Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1992).
54 Val spoke in interview (2 February 2004) of the impact of such court cases: ‘Procès, la plupart on
a gagné. On a fait avancer le droit de la presse. Il y a des jurisprudences sur Charlie hebdo. On est
content de ça’ [‘We have won most of our court cases. We have contributed to the advancement of
press law. There are jurisprudences relating to Charlie hebdo. We are happy about that’].
125
[‘There is no controversy over the editorial line. It’s not a line in any event, but a general
charter set by François Cavanna, the founder of the newspaper. It demands loyalty to
laïcité, the defence of ecology, democratic principles, the ideals of the Enlightenment,
the struggle against racism and anti-Semitism and the condemnation of cruelty to
55
animals.’]
Whilst bête et méchant humour was preoccupied with making jokes on sensitive topics as a matter of principle, under Val Charlie hebdo’s satire is presented
as la résistance joyeuse, or joyful militancy.56 Such favouring of serious political
values is rarely open to the unchecked original spirit of bête et méchant humour,
with carnivalesque obscenity being held back if it is deemed necessary for
the coherence of the newspaper’s critical message. If provocative humour is
perceived a useful tool to further its serious agenda, however, Charlie hebdo is
quick to defend its use, drawing on its bête et méchant heritage if necessary.
This was particularly apparent in the context of the newspaper’s most highprofile court case to date, which concerned its handling of the Danish caricature affair.57 Charlie hebdo had produced a special edition, dated 8 February
2006, wherein it reproduced the series of caricatures of the prophet Mohamed
that had originally been commissioned by the Danish broadsheet newspaper
Jyllands-Posten, and that had resulted in violent orchestrated international
protests. In addition to reproducing the original cartoons, the Charlie hebdo
team produced further ones of its own, including an editorial front cover cartoon
by Cabu, in which the prophet covers his face in his hands and laments, ‘C’est
dur d’être aimé par des cons’ [‘It’s hard to be loved by arseholes’] alongside
the headline ‘Mohammed débordé par les intégristes’ [‘Mohammed Overcome
by Integrists’]. Con was a clearly inflammatory term, but also one which resonated with the predilection for the use of con as an adjective within Hara-Kiri
and the old Charlie hebdo to describe the abject quality of humanity in general.
Charlie hebdo’s satirical material on the caricature affair was defended at the
trial as intended vigorously to defend the right to mock religion in the context
of laïcité, regardless of the sensibilities of believers. This message of disregard
for sensitivities and the right to provocative humour once more appealed to
its legacy of bête et méchant spirit. The February 2007 trial for incitement to
racial hatred, led by the Grande Mosquée de Paris, the Union des Organisations Islamiques en France and the Ligue Islamique Mondiale, resulted in the
newspaper’s acquittal, much to its triumph.
Alongside that of numerous other politicians and prominent public figures,
55 Interview of 2 February 2004.
56 Val stated of this spirit (interview of 2 February 2004): ‘Je disais simplement que c’était dégueulasse quand on rencontre des militants qui disent: “Moi, je sacrifie ma vie à cette cause”. Et moi je
dis: “Arrête! Fais autre chose!” Si tu n’en tires pas de bonheur, ça n’a pas de justification’ [‘I simply
said that it was disgusting to meet militants who announce “I’m sacrificing my life to this cause”.
I say, “Stop! Do something else!” If you don’t get happiness from it, there’s no justification’].
57 On the subject, see the article by Plantu in this volume.
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Charlie hebdo received a statement of support from Nicolas Sarkozy at the trial,
who, eager to climb aboard this particular electoral bandwagon, argued for ‘la
liberté de sourire de tout’, a message which also clearly echoed that of the bête
et méchant ethos, albeit tempered into the idea of ‘smile’ rather than ‘laugh’. In
his verdict of 22 March 2007 the judge, Jean-Claude Magendie, moreover also
situated the right to laugh within the broader accepted tradition of provocative
satire in France:
Toute caricature s’analyse en un portrait qui s’affranchit du bon goût pour remplir une
fonction parodique, que ce soit sur le mode burlesque ou grotesque […] [L]’exagération
fonctionne alors à la manière du mot d’esprit qui permet de contourner la censure,
d’utiliser l’ironie comme instrument de critique sociale et politique, en faisant appel
au jugement et au débat.
[‘All caricature is read as a portrait that emancipates itself from good taste to fulfil a
parodical function, whether in the burlesque or grotesque mode […] [E]xaggeration
functions in the same way as jokes that allow for censorship to be eluded, for irony
to be used as an instrument of political and social critique, by calling for critical judgment and debate.’]
With this successfully defended case, Charlie hebdo therefore once again found
itself testing the limits of free speech. It was probably never in great danger of
losing, given the absence of blasphemy laws in France, but this did not detract
from the media attention the case attracted.
Whilst the provocative humour of the newspaper in the Danish caricature
affair fitted cleanly into Charlie hebdo’s commitment to the defence of laïcité, in
July 2008, its prior insistence on the right to laugh at everything was proven not
to apply to Siné, who was sacked from the newspaper for his joking material,
which had nevertheless passed unnoticed prior to publication of the issue in
question. Tensions had long existed between Val and certain other contributors
to Charlie hebdo, who still strongly valued, wherever possible, a more global,
taboo-breaking and anarchic content.58 Siné was exemplary in this case and
had even shunned editorial meetings at the new Charlie hebdo from the outset,
due to his aversion to their overly earnest atmosphere. His work was simply
faxed in on a weekly basis. In his column of 2 July 2008, he attacked Nicolas
Sarkozy’s son, Jean Sarkozy, for opportunism in his forthcoming marriage to
the millionaire Jewish heiress Jessica Sebaoun, citing rumours that he would
be converting to Judaism for the occasion and would therefore go far in life.
For Val, this comment perpetuated an odious form of anti-Semitic stereotype by
linking Judaism with financial success.
On 8 July 2008, Siné’s article was denounced on the radio station RTL’s On
Refait le monde [‘Let’s Change the World’] programme by the Nouvel Observateur
journalist Claude Askolovitch, a personal friend of Val, who referred to it as
‘un article antisémite dans un journal qui ne l’est pas’ [‘an anti-semitic article
58 Some ceased collaboration with Charlie hebdo, most notably Lefred Thoron.
127
in a newspaper that is not’]. Siné was subsequently sacked from the newspaper when he refused to apologise in conjunction with the publication of a
unanimous condemnation of his comments, to be signed by the entire Charlie
hebdo team. His removal from Charlie hebdo generated both widespread readership uproar, which was often vented on the internet, and intense discussions
in the media, which went on throughout the summer of 2008. Much of the
uproar centred around the apparent double standards of a newspaper which
had vocally defended the freedom to laugh at everything in the context of the
Danish caricature affair, implicitly drawing on its bête et méchant lineage, but
which had then shown such an uncompromising reaction to Siné. A petition
in his support was drawn up on the initiative of Éric Martin, Benoît Delépine
and Lefred Thouron, and the fact that it rapidly gathered over 20,000 signatures indicates the strength of the feelings aroused, stemming from frustration
with the perceived incoherence of the newspaper’s humorous ethos as it exists
today.59 Indignation was also expressed by commentators who might potentially
have been expected to keep a degree of distance. For instance, in the Télérama
article entitled ‘L’Honneur perdu de Charlie hebdo’ (see above), cultural historian Stéphane Mazurier argued that the paper was no longer worthy of its old
title, given its treatment of Siné:
En virant Siné, Val élimine un des derniers bastions de résistance interne au journal.
Charlie hebdo est mort. Pourquoi conserver ce titre ? Il y a tromperie sur la marchandise, sinon publicité mensongère. En tant qu’historien du Charlie hebdo des années
1970, je demande donc solennellement à M. Val de changer le nom de son journal.
Plusieurs possibilités s’offrent à lui: Le Meilleur des mondes illustré, Le Figaro rigolo ou
Sarkoland-Posten.
[‘By firing Siné, Val has elimated one of the paper’s last bastions of internal resistance.
Charlie hebdo is dead. Why keep this title? The label is misleading, even deceptive. As
a historian of the Charlie hebdo of the 1970s, I solemnly request Mr Val to change the
name of his newspaper. Several options are open to him: The Best of All Worlds Illustrated, The Funny Figaro or Sarkoland-Posten.’]
It is important to point out, however, that in the midst of the uproar, the principal founder of bête et méchant, Cavanna, reiterated his loyalty to the project
in the newspaper, confirming that in his view, in present-day France, today’s
Charlie hebdo was still the closest surviving match to his original bête et méchant
project. He stated:
59 The petition, published in Le Nouvel Observateur of 30 July 2008, stated: ‘Nous connaissons bien
Siné: sa grande gueule, sa violence intellectuelle, son humour et surtout sa maison ouverte à
tous: Juifs, Arabes, Français, Noirs, Auvergnats, Bretons, pédés, communistes (liste non exhaustive), tous unis pour conchier autour d’un (ou plusieurs) verres une société de plus en plus bienpensante et moraliste’ [‘We know Siné well: his big mouth, his intellectual violence, his humour
and above all his house open to all: Jews, Arabs, Frenchmen, black people, Auvergnats, Bretons,
gays, communists (a non-exhaustive list), all united to denigrate around one (or a few) drinks an
ever more right-thinking and moralistic society’].
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jane weston
Quoi qu’on puisse dire – ou plutôt, qu’on suggère par omission – j’ai créé ce journal.
Moi, Cavanna. Avec Choron, oh que oui, et Delfeil de Ton, et Cabu, et Wolinski, et
Reiser, oui, oui! En tout cas, sans moi, il n’aurait pas existé. J’y ai insufflé ma conception de l’humour et de la critique, tout ça, tout ça. Quand les circonstances firent de
moi un simple collaborateur, je me suis plié à la discipline commune. Je ne crois pas
avoir démérité.
C’est pourquoi je défends ce journal avec toutes mes forces, de toute ma conviction. Il n’est pas exactement tel que je le concevrais si… Le ton n’est pas tout à fait
le mien, c’est le moins qu’on puisse dire… Il n’empêche pas que la presque totalité
de l’ancienne équipe – sauf Delfeil – s’y retrouvait, y compris Siné, et n’y subissait
aucune contrainte, n’est-ce pas Willem, n’est-ce pas, Cabu, n’est-ce pas, Wolinski?
[‘Whatever might be said or, rather, suggested by omission – I created this newspaper.
Me, Cavanna. With Choron, oh yes, and Delfeil de Ton and Cabu, and Wolinski, and
Reiser, yes yes! In all events, without me, it wouldn’t have existed. I breathed into it my
conception of humour and critique, all of that. When circumstances meant I became
a simple collaborator, I kept in line with the common discipline. I don’t think I have
let anyone down.
This is why I am defending this newspaper with all my strength, all my conviction. It is not exactly how I would conceive it if… The tone isn’t quite mine, that’s
the least one can say… But almost the entire team – apart from Delfeil – came back
together, including Siné, without restrictions – isn’t that so Willem, and Cabu, and
60
Wolinski?’]
Siné, however, went on to launch a new weekly satirical newspaper, Siné
hebdo, in September 2008. The newspaper is vigorously seeking to set itself up
as a more legitimate successor to the original Charlie hebdo, attempting more
faithfully to reproduce the militant bête et méchant spirit of the 1970s.61 It also
includes elements of bande dessinée intermingled with editorial cartooning, and
as such poses a direct challenge to Charlie hebdo in terms of its aesthetics.62
Such a challenge may, however, prove to be a stimulus to healthy competition
between the two publications, serving as a catalyst for further experimentation
with form and style in the cartoon-based satirical press.
60 The statement was made in Charlie hebdo, 30 July 2008.
61 In an interview in Le Matin [‘The Morning’] of 7 February 2009 entitled ‘Antisémite: L’Insulte qui
a remplacé fasciste’ [‘Anti-Semite: The Insult that has Replaced Fascist’], former Hara-Kiri and
Charlie hebdo contributor Delfeil de Ton commented: ‘Ils ont fait une erreur en virant Siné. C’est
d’ailleurs marrant, car son journal pique pas mal de lecteurs à Charlie hebdo. Je suis sûr que Val
n’avait pas prévu cette réaction, une réaction à la Choron! Il y a un état d’esprit qui revient, proche
de celui des années 1970’ [‘They made a mistake by firing Siné. It’s funny as well, because his
newspaper is stealing a good number of Charlie hebdo’s readers. I’m sure Val didn’t expect this
kind of reaction, a Choron-esque reaction! A particular kind of spirit has returned, similar to that
of the 1970s’].
62 Art historian Guillaume Doizy provides a running commentary and critical assessment each week
of the two publications’ front covers, ‘Le Match Charlie/Siné hebdo’, on his website at http://www.
caricaturesetcaricature.com (accessed 1 March 2009).
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Conclusion
The Siné affair has served to reveal amongst much of Charlie hebdo’s readership a clear nostalgia, sometimes bordering on romanticism, for the original
bête et méchant project as it existed in Hara-Kiri in the 1960s and which was
carried over into the original Charlie hebdo, as has been argued in this article.
Such nostalgia has helped to fuel the commercial success of Siné hebdo to date.
Choosing between the purchase of Charlie hebdo and Siné hebdo is currently far
from a non-partisan act, given the intense bitterness of the Val–Siné divide. The
most likely beneficiaries of the resulting profusion of material, if the two publications continue to flourish, should, however, be bande dessinée and caricature
enthusiasts. It is to be hoped that both publications will be able to prosper in the
French satirical press market, to facilitate ongoing innovation, sharing between
them the complex legacy of the bête et méchant project of the 1960s and 1970s.
Whatever direction the publications take, neither is likely to renew the exact
verve of bête et méchant spirit as it existed in its original form. Bête et méchant
humour in the 1960s and 1970s, as is the case for all humour, was indeed a
highly culturally determined, fragile and difficult-to-reproduce form of expression, both in terms of the conditions of its production and of its reception. The
satirical taboo-breaking of Hara-Kiri in the 1960s was almost unique to the
publication at the time, but today pseudo-acts of provocation are appropriated
even in advertising culture, to the point of becoming a standardised, ubiquitous
and pleasure-driven carnivalesque orthodoxy.63 The loss of the type of taboos
that contributed to the fall of the original Charlie hebdo is thus still in effect,
today more than ever. Racist, reactionary joking might today be a new form of
taboo for humour, but these are not taboos likely to be seriously breached by
either Charlie or Siné hebdo.64
In contrast to the elusiveness of bête et méchant comic spirit today, however,
the scope for continued development of the satirical newspaper format as a
site for hybrid elements of bande dessinée and editorial cartooning remains as
rich and flexible a field as ever. This aesthetic legacy of the original Charlie
hebdo, which cannot be separated from its bête et méchant history, will be able to
endure as the ongoing spirit of the original newspaper.
63 Cf. Michael Billig, Laughter and Ridicule: Towards a Social Critique of Humour (London: Sage, 2005),
especially page 240.
64 The humorist Dieudonné is a more likely candidate for such a role.
Cabu Reporter
Interview of Cabu by Tanitoc*
Abstract
French editorial cartoonist and comic-strip artist Cabu (pen name of Jean Cabut) is
interviewed by Tanitoc, French cartoonist and contributing artist to European Comic
Art. They talk about the evolution of political caricature in France, differing reactions
of people to being caricatured by a cartoonist or being filmed, and the use of archetypes in caricature. Cabu also discusses the influences of other cartoonists on his own
art, the high points of his cartooning career, his cartoon reportages, and various book
publications of his work.
The most obvious function of the game of caricature is to provide a critical deformation that tends to reform (or to abolish) what it deforms. The language of the artist
here joins that of the ‘moralist’: the caricaturist accuses by accentuating a character
trait [le caricaturiste accuse un trait], because he is the accuser of a moral attitude.
1
Claude Roy, ‘Esprit de la caricature’
You know, the 1970s represent a true archeo-world for us today. Those were the
Pompidou and Giscard years, with the media bottled up and government ministers
who called up journalists on the editorial boards of the public news media. […] Things
that were funny in 1970 did not make anyone laugh in 1992 – and I am delighted
about that, because the work of a humorist is to be a researcher and to invent new
forms of humour.
2
Philippe Val, interview December 2005
*
This interview was conducted on 7 November 2007 and was originally published as ‘Cabu reporteur’ in 303: Arts, recherches, créations 99 (2007), 50–63. It is reproduced here with the kind permission of Cabu, Tanitoc and the editors of 303: Arts, recherches, créations (http://www.revue303.com).
Notes by the translator (Mark McKinney) are indicated as such (Trans. note). All others are by
Tanitoc, from the original French version.
1 Claude Roy, ‘Esprit de la caricature’, La Caricature, art et manifeste, du XVIe siècle à nos jours [‘Caricature as Art and Manifesto, from the Sixteenth Century to the Present’], eds. Ronald Searle, Claude
Roy and Bernd Borneman (Geneva: Albert Skira Éditions d’Art, 1974), 13.
2 Philippe Val, interviewed by Alain Barbanel and Daniel Constantion in Médias 7 (December 2005).
The quotation is from page 44. Trans. note: Georges Pompidou, after having served as prime
minister for more than six years under President Charles De Gaulle, was president of France,
1969–1974. He was succeeded by Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, who was president 1974–1981. Both
European Comic Art 2.1 ISSN 1754-3797 (print) 1754-3800 (online) © Liverpool University Press
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cabu
The history of printing techniques has accompanied artists since saunterers
[le badaud] purchased wood-cut prints that narrated the hanging of notorious
bandits. Etymology teaches us that ‘reporter’ is an English term from the nineteenth century and derives from the old French term ‘reporteur’: ‘one who
relates’. So what is so special about the idea of a confrontation between reality
and a drawing, to create a narrative aimed at a multitude of readers? Some day
one must write the history of all the cartoonist reporters, who, from Jules Grandjouan to Ronald Searle, via Feliks Topolski, crossed social and geographical frontiers to capture words and gestures, thanks to their eloquent drawings. Cabu,
who was born in 1938, was destined to become a professional sketch-maker and
storyteller for the news press: he decided to become a ‘press cartoonist at the
age of ten’, admired the drawings of Dubout and of the cartoonists of L’Assiette
au beurre [‘The Butter Plate’] and produced a school newspaper, From A to Z (the
principal banned its sale!).
In 2003 Cabu went to Nantes to view the Jules Grandjouan exhibit: it seemed
wise to compare their work of cartoon reportage for the press and to speak with
someone who has been a key player in the history of the satirical press in France
since the 1950s, focusing especially in this interview on his work as a reporter.
Tanitoc: Recently you visited your hometown of Châlons-en-Champagne, to sit
at the stand of the newspaper L’Union de Reims [‘The Union of Reims’]. I would
like to go back in time, to your encounter with Jean-Marie Boëglin, in 1953, at
this very same newspaper, when he was in charge of its local bureau.
Cabu: I was fortunate to run into Jean-Marie Boëglin, because when I look back
at my drawings from that period... they weren’t that great!
Tanitoc: Thanks to that encounter, you began to draw fairground events for
L’Union...
Cabu: Yes, and town-hall meetings. I started out like that. Now when I go to the
French National Assembly, I think of the municipal meetings of Châlons, but...
it’s on a grander scale!
Tanitoc: So you were doing reportage from the very beginning of your career.
What form did this take? Sequences of images? Some drawings of important
moments, with commentary? Or were you simply taking down visual notes?
Cabu: Sometimes, but because I was not too good at sketching [en croquis], they
were right-wing presidents. Philippe Val is a musician and journalist, who (with Cabu and others)
helped relaunch the left-wing satirical Parisian weekly Charlie hebdo in 1992. He is currently its
editor and publisher. On Charlie hebdo, and Hara-Kiri and Le Canard enchaîné, see Jane Weston’s
article in this issue of European Comic Art.
Interview of Cabu by Tanitoc
133
were really snapshots; not direct drawings [du dessin direct]. Not sketches such
as I make now, on the spot, directly. They were a form of commentary on news
items. For example, I made drawings about the week’s films being shown at
Châlons.
Tanitoc: Do you think that independent production is the best kind, and that
in the end, when one looks at the history of the press in France, where a lot
of bande dessinée writers and artists have launched publications (subsequent
generations have generally come out of the fanzine scene), that cartoonists
need to take charge of things for themselves? I’m thinking of [René] Goscinny
at Pilote, and auteurs like Fred at Hara-Kiri…
Cabu: I think that right now things are a lot easier for young cartoonists, with
desktop publishing and computers. They can create a newspaper much more
easily than we could: yesteryear, we did this with roneotype – you know, it was
prehistoric stuff! But the main thing is to produce and sell a newspaper by
oneself, even if it’s handwritten.
Tanitoc: This might be jumping way ahead, but could you say something about
your current positions at Charlie hebdo and at Le Canard enchaîné? What is it,
how do you see yourself, as a cartoonist, in your position as editor, for example
in your choice of editorial matter? And what do your professional responsibilities consist of?
Cabu: At Charlie hebdo, I’m president of… what… what’s it called? [Laughter]
Tanitoc: You’ve forgotten the title printed on your business card?
Cabu: They gave it to me, because a title was needed, it’s rather… honorific!
At Charlie, you know, the decisions are collective, even the choice of the cover
is mostly collective. On Monday evenings, there are about 50 drawings on
the wall, and everyone gives his or her opinion. Generally there’s a cover that
emerges, that everyone likes. Otherwise, if there are several, its the editor-inchief, Philippe Val, who casts the deciding vote. At Le Canard it’s not the same,
because it’s in the hands of the journalists, who choose the drawings: we’re not
there when the choice is made.
Tanitoc: You say ‘the journalists’, but I have to react to that, because you yourself
have been a card-carrying journalist since…
Cabu: Since 1964: number 21,991. How about that! And on my card it says
‘cartoonist reporter’ [dessinateur reporter]. Very few cartoonists have a press card,
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cabu
because you have to prove that you focus on the news. It doesn’t give you a lot
of privileges, contrary to common belief: it used to get us onto train platforms
without having to buy a platform ticket, but now… We can get into certain
museums…
Stimulating Encounters
Tanitoc: Let’s get back to the 1960s: so you were working for L’Union de
Reims…
Cabu: Yes and I was also already working for Hara-Kiri, from 1960. I had just
returned from the Algerian War. I was lucky, I had encountered Fred at Ici Paris,
while taking in my drawings, as I had done weekly, beginning in 1956. We hit it
off well. One day he tells me: ‘I have a friend who wants to start up a newspaper.
Do you want to join in?’ I said: ‘Okay, with you’. He introduced me to Cavanna.3
That’s the story. I was lucky, because it’s a trade where you’re mostly isolated,
with each person at his or her drawing table, and from that point on, when
I joined the team of Hara-Kiri, Reiser was already there. Topor was already
there.4 So I had the benefit of an incredible opportunity to emulate others.
Tanitoc: There have been worse teams, that’s for sure. Can you say something
about the ‘Mésaventures de Marie-la-lune’ [‘Misadventures of Loony Marie’]?
(Fig. 1)
Cabu: Oh, yes, because ‘Marie-la-lune’ was a homeless person in Châlons – we
said a hobo [clocharde], at the time, which was right – who lived in a garden
shack, right behind my parents. She crisscrossed the town to pick up boxes, or
tin cans, which she sold. I had made a ‘star’, one could say, out of her, because
I had the ‘Misadventures of Loony Marie’ in L’Union de Reims. But after a while
I realised that kids were throwing rocks at her, whereas I wanted people to take
pity on this poor old lady. The fact that she was in the newspaper meant that she
was on the receiving end of even more stones than before. So I stopped. That’s
when I grasped the meaning of village idiocy [la connerie municipale]!
Tanitoc: I had been wondering whether you had ever given up defending anyone,
as a cartoonist reporter. Your comics are pretty ferocious with the people you
meet, on the whole. I would say that they don’t have a Robin Hood side to
them…
3 Who encouraged him to go into the cabarets to do drawn reportage about popular singers, by
giving him the rubric ‘Coin de nappe’ [‘Tablecloth corner’].
4 Trans. note: Jean-Marc Reiser (1941–1983) was a satirical cartoonist from the Lorraine region.
Roland Topor (1938–1997) was an artist of many talents: cartoonist, song-writer, script-writer, etc.
135
Figure 1: ‘Les Mésaventures de Marie-la-Lune’ [‘The Misadventures of Loony Marie’],
L’Union de Reims (1962)  Cabu.
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cabu
Figure 2: ‘Lettre ouverte au ministre des anciens combattants’ [‘Open letter to the Minister
of Military Veterans’]. The biting humour of this page, produced to a considerable degree
by the contrast between the narrating textual voice and the visual narrative, should not
prevent the reader from understanding that it superbly condenses and recounts the
war-time experiences of Cabu in Algeria. Originally published in 1969, and reprinted
in Cabu, Les Années 70 (Issy-les-Moulineaux: Vents d’Ouest, 2007)  Cabu. Trans. note:
This page also supplies us with the genesis of Cabu’s beauf [‘redneck’] character – he is,
first of all, a hard-nosed French army veteran of the Algerian War.
137
Cabu: Sometimes I defend people, but I don’t think that we have a lot of power.
Because people have been attacking stupidity for so long… Look, it’s been
multiplied by ten, especially with all the television channels. So one has to
remain modest. It’s not because one is defending someone that it helps out
that person.
The Moral
Tanitoc: I’m thinking again about your encounter with Jean-Marie Boëglin:
you’ve talked about the impact, the importance that the Algerian War had for
you, specifically for your anti-military stance, what you lived and saw down
there (Fig. 2); you say that, ironically, this same Jean-Marie-Boëglin also ended
up in Algeria during that period…5
Cabu: But facing me.
6
Tanitoc: On the other side. In the Jeanson network. You finally got together
again in 1976, 1977, for a joint publication. Could you tell us a little bit more
about this book, Ouvrez le massacre (La Démolition de Châlons) [‘Start the
Massacre (The Demolition of Châlons)’]. Did all the material that you had accumulated during those town meetings serve as root soil for it? What form did
the collaboration take?
Cabu: My pal Boëglin had not returned to Châlons, his hometown too – where
his parents were still living – for 14 years... Because the putchist generals had
been amnestied before […] the people, including him, who had assisted the FLN.7
5 As told in Cabu, Cabu passe aux aveux [‘Cabu Owns Up’], with Jean-Paul Tibéri (Paris: Jean-Cyrille
Godefroy, 1990).
6 Trans. note: During the Algerian War, Francis Jeanson (1922–), a French philosopher close to JeanPaul Sartre, organised a covert network of French supporters of the Algerian FLN (cf. below). The
réseau Jeanson [‘Jeanson network’] helped FLN militants avoid arrest in France, and smuggled
funds out of France, for deposit in Switzerland (part of the money was then used to buy arms
for the FLN, to fight the French). This gave rise to their nickname of porteurs de valise [‘suitcase carriers’]. It took the French secret service (DST, Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire
[‘Direction of Territorial Surveillance’]) three years to track down the network, and when it finally
succeeded in doing so (in 1960), it failed to catch Jeanson himself. Cf. Alistair Horne, A Savage
War of Peace: Algeria 1954–1962 (New York: New York Review Books, 2006; first ed. 1977), 237–238
and 416–417.
7 Trans. note: The putchist generals (Maurice Challe, Edmond Jouhaud, Raoul Salan and André
Zeller) tried to wrest control of the French army from President De Gaulle in April 1961, because of
the move towards Algerian independence. After the Algerian War (1954–1962), a series of French
amnesty laws, enacted over several decades, eventually erased virtually all penalties and judgements against French government personnel (including the generals) and civilians who had taken
part in illegal actions (e.g., rebellion, terrorism, torture, sabotage) against the French government
and its agents during the War. The FLN is the Front de Libération Nationale [National Liberation Front], the primary Algerian nationalist organisation, which launched the insurrection on 1
November 1954.
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cabu
When he returned, it was a shock, obviously, because a mayor had destroyed
half of the city to put up a shopping mall, which was always flooded because it
was too close to the canal, the Mau. Construction work wasn’t moving forward;
and in the meantime, a Carrefour hypermarket had opened on the outskirts of
town, and had sucked out the whole downtown. All the stores clustered around
it, just like in a lot of medium-sized cities in France. The downtown became
a desert. We realised that a RPR mayor had done more harm to Châlons than
the bombardments during the War,8 when the German army had demolished a
neighbourhood. The things that we had lived through before stood us in good
stead, because we had something to measure by: we had known a city that had
been animated. There was economic censorship when five hundred copies of
Ouvrez le massacre arrived: we didn’t know that the newsagent for the newsstand was a buddy of the mayor, from the same political party. He warned him.
The mayor told him: ‘Okay, I’ll buy the lot!’ It had come out with Éditions du
Sagittaire (a branch of Grasset). It took ten days for us to have books sent out
again through another channel. But there was a moral to the story: finally, the
mayor demolisher lost the elections and a Communist was elected! Imagine,
in a city of civil servants, with a military base, what a traumatic event there had
to have been, for a Communist to be elected! What I liked about the regional
press, was that if you make a drawing that shocks people or that questions a
local leader, you get feedback on it right away: people talk to you about it, they
chew you out… whereas in our national papers, besides getting sued, you don’t
often get feedback! There was a funny side, a very endearing one… We had the
impression that we could have an impact on something.
Seventies
Tanitoc: The Éditions Vents d’Ouest are publishing a series of books that bring
together your work, decade by decade. The first volume, Les Années 70 [‘The
Seventies’], has come out. How did you proceed, to select a portion of your
countless works?
Cabu: I didn’t have a hand in putting the book together: it’s Alain David, a
book series editor, who poked around in my attic. I let him do as he pleased,
and by the way, I’m happy with the result. He’s preparing Les Années 80 [‘The
Eighties’], and I wish him good luck!
(Asked about this work, Alain David explained that:
For Les Années 70, I thumbed through all of Charlie hebdo from 1969–1979. Beginning with about two thousand pages, I then made a purely subjective selection, trying
8 Trans. note: RPR, i.e. Rassemblement Pour la République [‘Gathering for the Republic’], a rightwing, Gaullist political party created in 1976, and absorbed in 2002 into a new political formation,
the UMP (now the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire [‘Union for a Popular Movement’]).
139
to eliminate the anecdotal, although keeping some of it, and retaining the essential
material. I had to eliminate a lot, and tried to focus on the beautifully done pages. It’s
a personal vision of 1970s France, that of an opinionated author, who is leftist, paci9
fist, a sixty-eighter [soixante-huitard], who likes lightheartedness and is curious about
everything. And, I should add, is not sectarian.)
Tanitoc: There are many double-pages, published in Hara-Kiri, then in Charlie
hebdo.10 I was wondering about how you go about making them. You’ve said that
you would go out on Tuesday and then return on Friday, for the wrap-up.
Cabu: Always at the end of the week. Now we do the wrap-up on Monday. What
was interesting is that at that time I would stay with readers. I had a rubric
entitled, ‘Invite me, and I’ll visit your home!’ I think it’s the only newspaper
that would allow that. If I drew for Le Figaro, it would sure surprise me if I could
stay in readers’ homes! I’ve sometimes slept in haystacks, or in piles of hay in
barns, because I went to visit some communes [communautés]. A reader would
tell me: ‘If you come visit me, you’ll have plenty enough to fill up a page!’ In the
beginning, I looked through the subscribers’ list, to figure out to whom I should
write. There was always someone who would answer me and invite me over.
Tanitoc: Did you have a special purpose? For example, before drawing these
pages about the nuclear facility at Dampierre-en-Burly (Fig. 3), did you contact
people?
Cabu: Yes, I had chosen the subject of nuclear power, because at the time people
were talking about it a lot. There were a lot of anti-nuclear demonstrations –
furthermore, you can see what that produced: nothing at all. There needed to be
a lot more people. The politicians said: ‘When you have 100,000 demonstrators
or more, it’s worth an opinion poll’. Below that level they didn’t give a damn.
That’s why small demonstrations aren’t worth anything; the large ones are.
Building the Narrative
Tanitoc: Let’s talk about those comics reportages. In ‘Comment vivent les
riches?’ [‘How Do the Rich Live?’], a reportage in Loir-et-Cher, where we meet
a famous castle owner, there’s an obvious formal device: you build things up,
and then we realise that it’s about Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, who was President
then (Fig. 4). How did you go about building the narrative and organising the
9 Trans. note: Someone who participated in the student and worker uprising of 1968 in France; cf.
below, the final section of the interview.
10 Hara-Kiri, which became Hara-Kiri hebdo in 1969 and disappeared one year later, having been
banned by the Minister of the Interior after its famous headline: ‘Bal tragique à Colombey: 1 mort’
[‘Tragic Ball at Colombey: 1 dead’], after the death of General De Gaulle in his home in Colombey.
On this subject see Jane Weston’s article in this issue of European Comic Art.
140
cabu
Figure 3: ‘Dampierre-en-Burly’, from Cabu, La France des beaufs (Paris: Éditions du
Square, 1979)  Cabu.
double-page? Did you think it through ahead of time? Did you draw the page
on site, or in the train on your way home? Two days later?
Cabu: Yes, in the train I often found the thread of the story: that’s what you
have to find. In a reportage you tell a little story, so it can’t be too disjointed.
You need an angle. Sometimes I had one from the outset. Sometimes it didn’t
141
work at all, because I couldn’t draw it, so it wasn’t the right one! In any case, I
make sketches on little slips of paper and then I put them together. That’s how
I go about doing my reportages.
Tanitoc: What I find interesting, is that we do in fact have drawings made on
site, based on your observation of the surroundings, and at times we have
characters – which are your archetypes – who take charge and play a role: the
bearded leftist, the redneck hunter [le beauf chasseur]…
142
cabu
Figure 4: ‘Comment vivent les riches?’ [‘How do the rich live?’], Cabu (1979), republished in Les Années 70 [‘The 1970s’] (Issy-les-Moulineaux: Editions Vents d’Ouest,
2007)  Cabu.
143
Cabu: I also encountered rednecks on site! But still, I shouldn’t… It’s not the
best way of doing a reportage. Even if there are archetypes, one should reinvent
them, one shouldn’t… You see, I’m being self-critical! One shouldn’t invent.
One should reproduce reality. Reality is funny enough. One always wants to
144
cabu
draw one’s characters: it’s so easy! But one shouldn’t do it too much. If you do
reportage, you should translate what you see.
Influential Quills
Tanitoc: Your drawings from that period – tell me if I’m wrong, because one
always makes connections that aren’t necessarily pertinent – remind me of
a certain number of cartoonists, specifically Searle, an Englishman, who,
throughout the war, was held as a prisoner in a Japanese camp and risked his
life to draw some extraordinary sketches of that experience...
Cabu: Ah yes, I’m familiar with those drawings. They really are very, very good.
Tanitoc: … and reportages like that of Hamburg, in the red-light district:11 they
depict strip-teasers, clients, etc.
Cabu: Yes, yes. I don’t deny their influence. Ronald Searle was also a master,
that’s for sure.
Tanitoc: Did you also read publications like The New Yorker?
Cabu: I would buy Punch,12 which was an English publication, not The New
Yorker. Because it has a coldish humour. It’s true that it’s very, very British. I
myself don’t use nonsense a lot: I’m surely French-ish [franchouillard] in that
way!
Tanitoc: In 2003 you were in Nantes with Claire Bretécher for the exhibition
dedicated to the Nantes cartoonist Jules Grandjouan (1875–1968).13 Had you
been aware of his work?
Cabu: I was familiar with the issues of L’Assiette au beurre with his drawings.14
I’ve always admired Grandjouan, it’s true. His life is mysterious: why did he
stop drawing… I don’t understand that very well.
Tanitoc: I think that in Grandjouan’s case, there was a kind of weariness. He
was an unsuccessful candidate twice in legislative elections. After his Communist commitment and then his expulsion from the Party, he had projects, a kind
of utopia for the city of Nantes… In any case, I see a connection between your
11 This illustrator and great admirer of George Grosz was sent around the world from 1959 to 1969
by Frank Zachary, the artistic director of Holiday Magazine.
12 The satirical, illustrated weekly, remarkable also for its longevity (1841–1992, then 1996–2002).
13 In the museum of the castle of the Dukes of Brittany in Nantes, from 1 February to 11 May.
14 The journal – which was illustrated, libertarian and satirical – was published from 1901 to 1912.
145
Figure 5: An image of the Ben Barka trial, drawn by Cabu for Le Figaro (1967)  Cabu.
respective work, whatever Jean Dutourd may think,15 beyond the fact that you
both lost court cases over your antimilitaristic publications, especially because
you and Grandjouan have been present at important trials: he at the retrial in
the Dreyfus Affair, in Rennes, which he covered…
Cabu: That’s true, yes.
Tanitoc: …and also the fact that L’Assiette au beurre allowed him to rub shoulders, like you in your professional début, with some of the best-known artists
in the profession: Caran d’Ache, Rabier, Delannoy…16
15 Both Cabu and Dutourd were invited by Bernard Pivot, on 9 December 1977, to participate in the
French cultural television show Apostrophes, on the Antenne 2 channel. Dutourd had challenged
Cabu, who had come to talk about his À Bas toutes les armées [‘Down With All Armies’], accusing the
cartoonists of Charlie hebdo of not possessing the talent of the cartoonists of L’Assiette au beurre.
16 Trans. note: Caran d’Ache (Emmanuel Poiré; 1858–1909) is a famous Franco-Russian cartoonist,
perhaps best known today for his (often anti-semitic) editorial cartoons on the Dreyfus Affair. He
also worked extensively on a wordless comic book (Maestro), never published during his lifetime, and
published many short, wordless comics. Benjamin Rabier (1864–1939) drew cartoons and comics,
including ones about Gédéon le canard [‘Gideon the Duck’]. He also made animated cartoons and
146
cabu
Cabu: But he wasn’t an anti-Dreyfusard, like all the other cartoonists: Forain,
Willette…17 All of them, except for Steilen and him.
Tanitoc: What experiences have you had in drawing cartoons at trials? In 1966,
1967, you were covering…
Cabu: The Ben Barka trial for Le Figaro (Fig. 5). But that was before Hersant,
and I would never have done that under Hersant!18 I covered the trial for 45
days.
Tanitoc: In the press box…
Cabu: Yes, and you know, they never found his body. De Gaulle had said: ‘I want
to know the truth’, but we never learned it. It was a trial that the Parisian elite
came out to watch and be seen at [où le Tout-Paris a défilé]. A great trial.
Tanitoc: So there was a nice collection of individuals?
Cabu: Yes, it was ideal for drawing. I even saw Papon take the stand. He was
Prefect of Police at the time, and he said that ‘everything was above board’ [‘tout
était en règle’]!19
Tanitoc: Now your work is mainly that of a newspaper cartoonist: an image that
comments on the news.
Cabu: Now there are young cartoonists at Charlie who are picking up the
torch.
wrote plays. Aristide Delannoy (1874–1911) was a painter and cartoonist, who contributed anarchist cartoons to various publications and was imprisoned for a pacifist caricature, depicting a
French general (d’Amade) as a butcher, for his participation in the French military ‘pacification’ (i.e.,
conquest) of Morocco.
17 Adolphe Léon Willette (1857–1926) was likewise born in Châlons. In 1889 he ran as the ‘antisemitic candidate’ [sic] in the legislative elections of Paris. Trans. note: Jean-Louis Forain (1852–1931)
was a talented French cartoonist and painter. Swiss-born Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen (1859–
1923) moved to Paris, where he worked as a cartoonist, illustrator and painter.
18 Trans. note: Robert Hersant (1920–1996) was a French media magnate.
19 Trans. note: Maurice Papon (1910–2007) was a high French government official who rose to
become Minister of Finance under Prime Minister Raymond Barre. He is now best known for two
state crimes in which he played a key role: sending Jews from the Bordeaux region to the Drancy
concentration camp (where many died) in the Paris region, and from there to the Nazi death
camps; as Prefect of Police for Paris, under President De Gaulle, he directed the police massacre
(of dozens or hundreds), beatings and a vast roundup (of thousands) of Algerians during a mass
demonstration organised by the FLN in Paris on 17 October 1961. He helped to cover up both of
these crimes for many years, before he was finally tried and judged for crimes against humanity,
for his role in the Nazis’ Final Solution.
147
Figure 6: L’Incendie du 26 août 2005 dans le 13 arr. (M. Chevaleret)’ [‘The fire of 26
August 2005 in the 13th arrondissement (Metro station Chevaleret)’], from Cabu, Cabu et
Paris (Editions Hoëbeke, 2006)  Cabu. Trans. note: This fire, possibly set by criminals,
killed seventeen Africans, including fourteen children, and injured dozens of others.
At the time of the fire 139 people, from several African countries (Mali, Senegal, Ivory
Coast, Gambia), were living in the 1920s-era building located on boulevard Vincent
Auriol. It was one of the worst French fires, in terms of deaths caused, since the end
of the Second World War. The building was owned by the city of Paris and operated by
an independent agency (France Euro Habitat), whose responsibility in the nature and
spread of the fire has been investigated. It was one of three fires in Paris that same year
that killed a total of 49 people, many of whom were African immigrant workers or their
children. It sparked a major public debate and an effort by the government to provide
better housing to vulnerable, working-class immigrant workers.
148
cabu
20
Tanitoc: People like Luz… What do you think?
Cabu: It’s a good thing that they’re there. There’s also Riss,21 who’s very good.
They have their own perceptions of things, and that’s very good. In Charlie
hebdo one can do reportage, because no other newspaper gives a whole page to
a cartoonist. From time to time there are attempts, but… It’s only in Charlie that
one can do that (Fig. 6).
The Heart of the Subject
Tanitoc: So let’s talk about the role, in reportage, of the film image, and of its
supposed power in comparison with the drawn image. You look at the people
you encounter with the acute eye of a cartoonist. I believe that you are very
discreet in your way of going about your business, but do you encounter hostile
or positive reactions, from people being drawn? Or do you work from memory
after having taken notes directly?
Cabu: No, I always try to draw in front of the client! Someone who sees you
scribbling is unnerved. Whereas if you bring in a movie camera, people don’t
hold anything back; they let it all out. I’ve seen that for myself, because during
the 1980s I participated in a television show entitled La Vie en face [‘Life on the
Other Side’]: a one-and-a-half-hour reportage that aired around 11 p.m. There
were three perspectives [regards]: the eye of a great photographer, there was a
film director and there was a cartoonist. And we mixed it all together. It was
montage, not live material. For example, we spent a week at Libé.22 A week in
Villejuif, among the cancer patients. Obviously, there was preparatory work
first. There were sick people, former smokers, who wanted to talk about their
experience with tobacco, volunteers. And I made drawings against tobacco. I
showed them to the sick person, in bed, ill with a smoker’s cancer, and who
were close to the end, generally. If it made them laugh, we used the drawing!
We did a report in the high security prison of Flins: we were in an inmate’s cell
(furthermore, we were happy to get out in the evening!), and he didn’t want
me to draw him – whereas in front of the TV camera, he told all: he had done
a hold-up, anything we wanted, but the drawings, they bothered him! I don’t
20 Trans. note: Luz (Renald Luzier) is a satirical cartoonist who contributes to Charlie hebdo and has
published several comic books as well.
21 Trans. note: Like Luz, Riss is a satirical cartoonist at Charlie hebdo who also publishes comic books.
Like Cabu, Riss has covered French trials as a cartoonist reporter (see, for example, his book on the
Papon trial). Photographing and filming trials is generally not allowed in France, whereas drawing
or sketching them is accepted.
22 Trans. note: Libération, a newspaper founded by members of the French far left (Jean-Paul Sartre
was a co-founder), is now a vaguely left-of-centre Parisian daily, struggling to stay afloat. Comics
fans appreciate the special issue that the newspaper publishes on the Thursday of the annual
French comics festival in Angoulême.
149
Figure 7: ‘Cimetière de Leningrad’[‘Leningrad Cemetery’], from Cabu, Plutôt Russe que
mort [‘Better Red than Dead’] (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1987)  Cabu.
Figure 8: ‘Une petite mendiante au jardin botanique de Calcutta’ [‘A young beggar girl
in the botanical gardens of Calcutta’], from Cabu, Cabu en Inde [‘Cabu in India’] (Paris:
Editions du Seuil, 2002)  Cabu.
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cabu
know why… It’s true that it bothers people when we draw while they’re watching
us. You’ve surely observed that too. You can hide behind a movie camera, and
there you can draw to your heart’s content. You’re not seen, they only see the
camera, they’re only interested in that! Their 15 minutes of celebrity.
Tanitoc: Have you ever been sent out by a newspaper to cover a specific event?
I’m thinking of that because I was again looking at images made by Grandjouan,
who had been sent by L’Assiette au beurre, along with Florès and Delannoy, to
cover the catastrophe in the Courrières mines (official toll: 1,099 dead, 562
widows, and 1,133 orphans).
Cabu: I don’t think that I’ve ever covered a catastrophe. I drew a bit for Le Matin
de Paris [‘The Paris Morning’], for which I went to do a reportage with Jean-Paul
Kaufman.23 Three days in the Nantes wine country, to find out whether Coluche
would get his signatures.24 Kaufman, who was familiar with the region, told
me: ‘We’re going to have some mayors who are pretty funny. I think that they’re
going to give him their signature’. And in the end, after having been to 29 town
halls in three days, none wanted to ‘give his signature to a clown’. That was
commissioned work. Or some trials. But I didn’t cover the tsunami, or similar
things. The most disheartening things were the military trials of conscientious objectors, which were always held in a military court. There were armed
soldiers, who presented arms at the opening. That has a strange effect. It’s
really... It’s frightening. Aside from that, I always try to keep my reportages in
the realm of comedy (Figs. 7 and 8).
May 1968
Tanitoc: What struck me when I read La France des beaufs was that in the end
not much has changed.25 Marchais is no longer with us,26 but we still find the
23 A journalist who unintentionally became famous in May 1985, when he was kidnapped in Lebanon
along with the researcher Michel Seurat, by the Organisation de la Justice Révolutionnaire [Islamic
Jihad Organisation].
24 Trans. note: Coluche (Michel Colucci), born in 1944, was a stand-up comic and film actor who
became a national folk hero, before he died in 1986 in a motorcycle accident. He launched himself
as a candidate for the French presidency in 1981, but withdrew before the elections. Candidates
for the presidency must obtain several hundred signatures of elected officials (including mayors)
before they can be put on the national ballot.
25 A collection of reportages published by the Éditions du Square in 1979. Trans. note: Beauf [‘redneck’]
is a term probably derived from beau-frère [‘brother-in-law’] and launched by Cabu’s comics and
caricatures.
26 Trans. note: Georges Marchais (1920–1997) was a French trade unionist and politician, who rose
through the ranks of the French Communist Party (PCF) and its trade union (the CGT) to become
Secretary General of the PCF (1972–1994). He was a member of the French Parliament and was
a candidate for French presidency. Humorists loved to poke fun at him, in part because of his
colourful mannerisms and use of language.
151
same well-known faces among the political personnel. And – is it funny or
depressing? – a form of immobility, of inertia among people’s perceptions, in
social choices, rituals, communal living habits…
Cabu: It’s true. You’re right. Things aren’t moving much.
Tanitoc: There’s perhaps a corresponding form of nostalgia. The two answer
each other, periodically.
Cabu: The only moment when I really believed that we were going to change
the world a little, was in 1968. I’m a sixty-eighter [soixante-huitard]. It’s a good
memory for me, contrary to Sarkozy, who should reflect on things. Before
1968, a divorcé could never have been elected to the French presidency. He
was already a divorcé before Cécilia left him. He would never have become
president without May 1968. What has really changed a lot, in spite of it all, is
the mindset of women, and the benefits that they have accrued since then. It’s
normal, moreover, because they had to catch up from way behind. It’s May 1968
that made French society evolve a bit. I agree with you though: it hasn’t evolved
much in spite of it all!

Bête et méchant: Politics, Editorial Cartoons and Bande dessinée in

Transcription

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