'Funny' Germans

In France, Plantu is an institution. Six days a week for almost 30 years, he's drawn the front-page cartoon of the daily newspaper, Le Monde.

The past three decades have been a period of upheaval in Europe - and France hasn't always seen eye-to-eye with its big German neighbor. But Plantu's cartoons of German leaders and German people are a chronicle of Franco-German relations and an object lesson in how caricature can be used not to push people further apart but to bring them together.

Now, a selection of these cartoons have been put on show at the Heinrich Heine Maison in Paris.

It's called "Drole de Peuple/Komisches Volk!" or "A Funny People" in English. Plantu draws German Chancellor Angela Merkel irreverently but affectionately as the sort of comfortingly well-rounded "hausfrau" you might expect to see pushing a trolley round a Lidl hard discount supermarket.

In one of the cartoons you can see in this show, French President Nicolas Sarkozy is pictured in bed with Merkel. His real wife, Carla Bruni - tall and elegant - asks, "who's that?" to which Sarkozy replies: "It's for Europe!"

Artistic talent

Plantu was born Jean Plantureux in 1951. He went to the Lycée Henri IV, usually considered Paris's best secondary school. But he wasn't much of a pupil. He was a dreamer and an introvert. "I thought in pictures. That was my language. That's how I communicated."

His parents wanted him to be a doctor. He struggled through two years of medical school before his parents relented and allowed him to go and study drawing in Brussels, where he received the support of Hergé, the creator of Tintin.

Back in France, his talents were quickly discovered by Le Monde which, though it has eschewed to this day photographs on the front page, made Plantu's cartoons a daily feature of "la une" from 1985 onwards.

Of all the newspapers in France, Le Monde is the place of reference not just for foreign affairs but also for diplomacy. And Plantu has put a lot of thought into the particular challenges attached to representing foreigners.

Subtle messages

"There's always criticism in my pictures," says Plantu. "There's always sarcasm. Sometimes they are caustic and very strong. But there's always a love for the other people that's represented," he says.

"In my job it is very easy to make hate," he says. "When I draw someone, I can build hate! So I talk to my hand and I say 'be quiet, be slow. You have an opinion. Fine. But you can draw slowly and without blasphemy, without being offensive.' It's very easy to be offensive in a cartoon but, in this way, I am able to draw without hatred."

Not that this gently-spoken man seems much tempted by that particular emotion. Especially when it comes to the Germans. He is one of that small but select club of French Germanophiles. He even has a holiday home in the Black Forest, an extraordinary thing for a Frenchman. And with Plantu, whatever the subject, you are a long way from the gruesome and cruel caricatures - which are sometimes also very funny - that you can find elsewhere on French newsstands.

Did he ever slip up? He's under pressure every day, after all, to come up with a cartoon that's going to make people laugh, make them reflect. "Not with the Germans," he replies. "But with the Austrians, yes."

It was when they voted for Kurt Waldheim to serve a second term of office as chancellor in 1985. "The first time they voted for him - fine. But the second time they knew what he'd done during the War and they voted for him anyway," Plantu says. "I was angry and my cartoons were very, very strong. So strong that the president in Vienna wrote to me asking me to come to Austria!" He wanted to reassure him that Austrians weren't as bad as all that...

The example is revealing. As too is the portrayal of veteran French nationalist leader Jean-Marie Le Pen as a Nazi brown shirt.

Others might be branded with the swastika in his caricatures but not the Germans.

Plantu has even kept his cool while some in France are getting worried about Germany again, as the eurozone debt crisis deepens, and Germany's powerbase grows in Europe.

And if the Franco-German "odd couple" have managed to stay together so long, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, it is to some small degree thanks to him.

Author: John Laurenson / ji
Editor: Gabriel Borrud