Jean Plantureu, better known by his pen name Plantu, has drawn his last cartoon for Le Monde.
As he announced in January, the designer Plantu, who has just celebrated his 70th birthday, has asserted his retirement rights within the daily newspaper. He signs his last drawing in one of Le Monde in the edition published on Wednesday and dated Thursday. We see an Emmanuel Macron not knowing what measures to take to curb the Covid-19 epidemic. “Nothing was easy because it was my last drawing,” he told France 24.
For his latest drawing on the front page of the benchmark French daily, which adorns the edition published on Wednesday and dated Thursday 1er April, Plantu shows President Macron at the Elysee Palace, turned upside down and not knowing, a few hours before his speech, what new measures to announce against the Covid-19.
The drawing is accompanied by multiple nods to readers of Le Monde: little mice (animals that often decorate his drawings) waving a handkerchief to say goodbye, a masked Marianne, and several doves (his other favorite animal), including one holds a question mark in her beak, a reference to her very first drawing published in the newspaper in 1972.
Plantu, whose drawings have featured on the front page of Le Monde every day since 1985, has drawn his last image for the newspaper dated April 1 which comes out this afternoon, Le Monde being one of France’s last ‘evening’ papers.
Entitled ‘Plantu et Le Monde, 50 ans d’histoire’ the drawing includes an image of his trademark dove holding a vaccine syringe…
Plantu returned to Paris [from Brussels] and attempted to sell his cartoons to the French daily newspapers. He was hired by Bernard Lauzanne of Le Monde and his first cartoon, about the Vietnam War, was published on October 1, 1972. In 1974, Claude Julien, then-director of Le Monde Diplomatique, also began publishing Plantu’s drawings.
In 1980 Plantu began to work with Le Journal Phosphore, a relationship which would continue until 1986. In 1982, André Laurens and Claude Lamotte, respectively the director and editor in chief of Le Monde, asked him to begin drawing cartoons for the Sunday edition of the newspaper.
In 1985, the head of Le Monde, André Fontaine, started to publish Plantu’s cartoons daily, saying that this would return political satire back to its former standing as a French tradition.
The European Cartoon Gallery has a Plantu gallery page.
