Paris (AFP)
Shy with a soft voice but a cartoonist feared by politicians ... Plantu has established himself in the world as a star of press cartoons, hardly appreciated by his peers and sometimes causing controversy.
The one who will celebrate his 70th birthday at the end of March at the same time as his departure from the evening daily has seen decades of history scroll with his pencil.
The left-hander began to draw under the seven-year term of Georges Pompidou and returned his apron just after Donald Trump left the White House.
With, omnipresent in his work, a mischievous little mouse which quickly becomes his signature.
His favorite theme is peace.
In 2006, with the help of the former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, he created "Cartooning for Peace", an international network of committed cartoonists who fight, with humor, for the respect for cultures and freedoms.
As if to better illustrate his favorite subject, the Picasso-style dove is also recurring.
The bird was present from the first drawing he published in Le Monde, in October 1972, devoted to the Vietnam War.
And, on his last sketch dated January 22, we find the dove, American flag in its beak and overlooking the new American president, Joe Biden.
Born March 23, 1951 in Paris, Jean Plantureux, that's his name, has a father who is an industrial designer at the SNCF and a mother, it seems, a bit like a viper.
Enough to make a good cartoonist ...
And his passion in high school is precisely to draw.
"At Henri-IV, I was the only one to take drawing lessons. It was in 1968, the fight was not my thing".
But, once he has the bac in his pocket, his parents prefer to enroll him in medical school.
"One evening in 1971, I announced to my parents that I was quitting medicine, that I was going to do comics in Brussels and that I was getting married!"
With Chantal, with whom he will have four children.
- "You can kill!"
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Financially, it's difficult and he quickly returned to Paris.
He sells furniture at Galeries Lafayette, white wood department.
But continues to draw and manages to cram the first drawings in the world.
200 francs each.
It left for a career which will also see him crunch in other titles like L'Express.
In 1978, he was entitled to his first front page sketch.
It will then be every Saturday then, consecration in 1985, every day!
André Fontaine, then director of the publication, wanted to "give back its place to the French tradition of political drawings".
The political world will quickly start to tremble ... "You can kill!"
François Mitterrand told him one day.
It is true that he is not always tender.
He bites Edouard Balladur - who, it is said, "vomited him" - in a sedan chair, Simone Veil in a swimsuit or even Nicolas Sarkozy in Iznogoud.
Some drawings are controversial.
As in 2010 when, faced with the scandal of children raped by priests, he published a sketch of the Pope sodomizing a child, entitled "Pedophilia: the Pope takes a stand".
"My job is the art of controlled skidding," he said in 2018 in Vanity Fair.
In 2016, he mocked the launch by Dolce and Gabbana of a collection of hijabs by showing a veiled Muslim woman wearing a belt of explosives and the comment "When will the fashion belt?"
Outcry on social networks where some accuse him of making an amalgamation between Islam and Islamism.
"I want to defend the image of women," he defends himself.
Others do not like his drawings on "yellow vests" either, calling him "neo-Poujadist" or "rancid conservative".
In the small French world of caricature, he is not very popular.
"His departure from the World is a non-event, it doesn't affect me. I only met him once and I must admit that I never paid too much attention to his drawings," said Friday to AFP Jacek Wozniak, who works for Le Canard enchaîné.
"Inelegant", "individualist", lets go another.
Many still reproach him for having spoken out in 2006 against the publication of the Muhammad caricatures.
He then invoked the necessary "self-censorship" and "the journalistic responsibility of the designer".
© 2021 AFP