Paris (AFP)
Divorce on the ice floe: the press cartoonist Xavier Gorce, creator of "Indégivables", left Le Monde with a crash on Wednesday, accusing the daily of having yielded to the pressure of social networks by apologizing for having published one of his drawings, considered shocking by many Internet users.
"I am announcing that I immediately decide to stop working for Le Monde. Personal, unilateral and final decision. Freedom cannot be negotiated," said on Twitter the cartoonist, who had worked for a long time with the newspaper, among d 'other publications.
Xavier Gorce had been signing drawings for a daily Monde.fr newsletter since 2002 and his famous "Indégivrables", penguins gifted with words that he uses to comment with irony on the news, had spread in the pages of the newspaper in 2012.
A departure caused by a decision: the management of Le Monde apologized on Tuesday for one of his drawings on the theme of incest, which had aroused many reactions on social networks.
It showed a young penguin asking a fellow man: "If I have been abused by the adopted half-brother of my transgender father's partner who has become my mother, is it incest?"
Some social network users saw it as a form of transphobia and criticized the designer for making fun of incest victims, criticism that the designer rejected outright on Twitter.
"This drawing can indeed be read as a relativization of the gravity of the acts of incest, in inappropriate terms vis-à-vis victims and transgender people", had for her part underlined the editorial director of Le Monde, Caroline Monnot, in a message posted on the daily's website.
- "People's courts" -
In an interview with the weekly Le Point, posted online before the announcement that he was ceasing his collaboration with Le Monde, Xavier Gorce attacked the attitude of the daily, drawing a parallel with the decision of the New York Times to give up publish caricatures in its international edition after a controversy.
"To believe that humor would consist in making fun of the victims is a misunderstanding, I do what I have always done, I ironize on absurd situations", he defended, saying to himself "convinced that the drawing of press is not there to lecture or participate in outbursts of collective indignation ".
"I see above all that the susceptibility of social networks has struck again!", Lamented the designer, himself an assiduous user of Twitter, criticizing "popular courts" which "arrogate to themselves the right to say what is correct and what is not".
"I hope that the woke culture present in the Anglo-Saxon so-called left-wing press is not rubbing off on the French press ...", he concluded, an allusion to the "cancel culture", which pushes American activists and the media to boycott certain intellectuals or artists.
In the midst of a recurring debate on freedom of expression and the right to caricature embodied in particular by Charlie Hebdo, personalities have given their support to Xavier Gorce, like Caroline Fourest or Nicolas Bedos.
- "Not a censorship nor a sanction" -
For his part, the director of the World Jérôme Fenoglio, interviewed by AFP, defended the position of the newspaper and took note of his departure.
"It is a decision of his making, it was not our wish at all that he ceased his collaboration", he assured.
"There was a failure of our editorial circuit, this drawing was failed and we should not have published it. He considers our apologies to be a disavowal but it is not a disavowal in itself, it is not a censorship or a sanction, it is just to recognize our editorial responsibility ", he added.
For the manager, "the freedom of the press works both ways", and that alongside "the freedom for designers to draw what they want, there is a freedom for publications to make the decision to publish what they want, "he said, assuring that the press cartoon kept its place in the world.
© 2021 AFP