Paris (AFP)
Goodbye little mice ... From Thursday for its cover, Le Monde will call on cartoonists from all over the world, from the association "Cartooning for peace" founded by Plantu, which will end a close career on Wednesday. half a century in the newspaper.
As he announced in January, Plantu, who has just celebrated his 70th birthday, has asserted his retirement rights in the daily newspaper.
He will sign his last drawing in one of Le Monde in the edition published on Wednesday and dated Thursday.
To mark the occasion, the daily will publish, in addition to its final one-page drawing, an eight-page supplement retracing his 49 years in Le Monde.
A rich career that began in October 1972, in the midst of the Vietnam War, with a drawing of a dove.
It was in 1985 that his drawings became a distinctive feature of the newspaper, when Le Monde decided to dedicate a piece of its front page to him every day.
To turn the page, the daily will now open its front page to dozens of French and international cartoonists, via a partnership with the Cartooning for Peace association launched in 2006 by Plantu with Kofi Annan, the former secretary general of the UN.
This network brings together more than 200 professionals from all continents, including French and French speakers, which will allow you to vary your perspectives on current affairs on a daily basis.
"Every day, the association will offer us 4 to 5 drawings, made either on the initiative of their designers, or because we have ordered them, and as always the World management will choose the drawing that we think is the most adapted, in the context of the one "of the day, explained to AFP the director of the daily Jérôme Fenoglio.
- "Cross the eyes" -
If these drawings will have to respect the graphic codes and the format of the World, this partnership will bring an unprecedented variety of points of view, underlines the person in charge.
"The press cartoon has an issue of renewal, openness and feminization and we said to ourselves that the departure of Plantu was, while guaranteeing the maintenance of a drawing in the front page of the newspaper, the opportunity to open that window "by handing it over to the members of Cartooning for Peace," he said.
"It is a very strong message", he argues, because this initiative will make it possible to "cross the glances" and to "make dialogue with the readers" of the French and foreign designers, that it is on the French or international news. .
An approach distinct from that of another daily, Liberation, which relies on the designer Coco.
Chance of the calendar, this figure of Charlie Hebdo will succeed, also this week, the official cartoonist of Libé, Willem, becoming the first woman in France to play this role in a major daily.
- Special edition -
On this subject, Libé announced Tuesday that it would publish a special edition Wednesday, in which Willem will say his "farewell" to the readers.
"There is a change of generation, it is obvious, since we have two cartoonists who were emblematic of their publication and who at the same time assert their pension rights, and each newspaper has chosen to renew itself, to turn to cartoonists who conform to what they have been trying to show for years ", Libé by opting for a designer from the same satirical vein as Willem, and Le Monde with a new generation in the lineage of Plantu, argues Fenoglio.
In any case, through this new device, Le Monde, which publishes on average more than a thousand drawings per year (excluding illustrations) intends to reaffirm its support for designers and caricatures.
Unlike the New York Times which decided in 2019 to stop political cartoons in its international edition, and despite the controversy caused by the departure of Xavier Gorce, the father of the "indégivables" who slammed the door of the newspaper at the beginning of year.
"Plantu had a wish which completely met mine: to pursue an orientation strongly favorable to press cartoons", and "it was never a hypothesis" to move away from it, assures the director of Le Monde.
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