The attack by Islamic terrorists against the offices of Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris on January 7th 2015, which left 12 dead and 11 wounded, caused widespread shock and indignation in France, illustrated in a nationwide turnout of more than four million people protesting the massacre and other attacks perpetrated days later, notably a hostage-taking at a kosher supermarket close to the capital when four people were killed and nine others wounded.
The victims of the shootings at Charlie Hebdo – carried out by two brothers armed with Kalashnikov rifles following the weekly’s publication of cartoons of the prophet Mohammed – included some of France’s best-known and most-popular cartoonists. The killings prompted impassioned debates over the rights and responsibilities of freedom of expression – a freedom exercised by Charlie Hebdo with satire and poking fun at, among others, religions of all kinds – and also sparked a popular wave of interest in the works of editorial cartoonists.
But French cartoonist Aurel (real name Aurélien Froment), whose work appears in Le Canard Enchaîné (a French satirical and investigative weekly), and which also featured regularly in the daily Le Monde, says that that interest has faded away, while the “spirit of Charlie” – an oft-used phrase to summarize the magazine’s unbridled irreverence – has been cynically hi-jacked to serve interests which have nothing to do with those of editorial cartoonists.
In a 32-page illustrated essay entitled Charlie quand ça leur chante (meaning “Charlie, when it suits them”), published earlier this month in France by Futuropolis, Aurel details the decline of his profession to the backdrop of the slump in the printed press. “For an editorial cartoonist, the biggest difficulty is getting published and being paid correctly,” he says.
He argues that the memory of the Charlie Hebdo victims, who included Charb (Stéphane Charbonnier), Cabu (Jean Cabut), (Philippe ) Honoré, Tignous (Bernard Verlhac) and (Georges) Wolinski, has been used for settling political scores and serving personal ambitions, while leaving editorial cartoonists, once again vulnerable, to their uncertain fate. “As of the day following the attack against Charlie, I understood that we were going to be taken over, used, drowned in the crocodile tears of people who do nothing for our profession to continue to exist,” writes Aurel in his album essay.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
He sets out how, following the January 2015 attacks and the passing show of interest in cartooning, the precarious nature of the profession soon returned. One factor was that the move of titles onto online publishing rarely included cartoons. The French body that issues press cards, la commission de la carte de presse, reported that last year 36 cartoonists were employed on a salaried basis, out of which just five were on permanent contracts.
Aurel is angered at how the issue of the freedom of expression of cartoonists has become focussed solely on how religions are treated. “Colleagues were assassinated because of their cartoons on religious themes,” he told Mediapart. “But that’s not a reason it should become the alpha and omega of our freedom of expression.”
He warns of the takeover by the super-rich of press titles and social media, which he sees as the greatest imminent threat for democracy. An example of that came at the beginning of this month when Washington Post editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning in 2001 and the Reuben Award in 2017, quit the daily after it refused to publish one of her cartoons. The cartoon featured Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, owner of The Washington Post, and other tech company billionaires kneeling, gifts in hand, before Donald Trump.
In a statement issued online, Telnaes, who had worked for the daily since 2008, underlined that “until now” she had “never had a cartoon killed because of who or what I chose to aim my pen at”.
“The cartoon that was killed criticizes the billionaire tech and media chief executives who have been doing their best to curry favor with incoming President-elect Trump,” she wrote. “There have been multiple articles recently about these men with lucrative government contracts and an interest in eliminating regulations making their way to Mar-a-lago.”
The group in the cartoon, she detailed, included Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook and Meta, Sam Altman, CEO of AI, Patrick Soon-Shiong, publisher of The Los Angeles Times, the Walt Disney Company, and Jeff Bezos, proprietor of The Washington Post.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
Aurel argues that if editorial cartooning is threatened with extinction in France, it is because it is caught in a vice (a metaphor he uses throughout his essay) between contradictory movements. One is a reactionary clique, represented by the political movement Printemps républicain (Republican Spring), created in 2016 and which is self-described as acting to promote secularism and to oppose political Islamism and the far-right, but which stands accused of using the heritage of the Charlie Hebdo victims to limit the freedom of others and impose a universalism that smacks of colonialism.
Aurel says this involves manipulating secularity in order to hide an “anti-Muslim racism” while also accusing a section of the Left to have intellectually armed terrorism. In the media, this clique, he argues, cleverly uses editorial cartoonists as a shield against attacks and to promote its version of freedom of expression, which is nothing other than the freedom to think like them.
“The ‘spirit of Charlie’ is cited in order to go about things which are anti-Charlie,” Aurel says. “They misappropriate freedom of expression by claiming that to question a certain type of humour, or to question their arguments, is intolerant and therefore preventive of their freedom of expression.” He denounces the idea that, in the name of Charlie, one can “laugh at anything except Charlie”.
The other side of the vice is represented by a section of society that he sees as more sensitive to issues of discrimination and social oppression than was previously apparent. Rather than seek to exercise the right to mock anything and everything, or, on the opposite, to imagine the new generation as “woke” censors, Aurel advises his colleagues that “one must always keep in mind the need to avoid hurting people gratuitously, and to exercise our freedom with responsibility” – but without giving up on irreverence. “It’s not self-censorship, it’s just to reflect on the ideas and stereotypes that are conveyed by our jokes.”
“If we took into greater consideration the suffering of people, society would be less tense,” he says. “What I try to argue in my book is that the problem doesn’t come from the readers. It is neither a question of self-censorship due to fear of religion, nor a prevention [caused] by a woke generation whose only taste is for cancel culture.”
A cartoonist, he underlines, addresses a subject and context to a readership that is generally aware of the editorial line of the publication it appears in. When a cartoon is posted on social media, it is removed from its original editorial framework and circulates among people of all sensitivities, including those who the cartoonist was not initially addressing.
When a cartoonist draws a caricature, they might embellish a person’s features and may turn to stereotypes – the bushy beard of the radical Islamist, or a tank top and earrings for a gay man. Aurel urges the practice to change, and for cartoonists to heed the “wokes” because “they oblige [them to enter into] a reflection, and to be better political humorists, finer analysts of society”.
For Aurel, what can save the profession of editorial cartoonists, who often express what a journalist cannot write, is a return to impertinence, in particular with regard to all forms of power and domination. “A good cartoon is never on the side of the powerful,” he insists.
-------------------------
- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse