Plantu is a French editorial cartoonist whose work is best known for
its frequent appearance in Le Monde. In 1971, he quit medical school in
order to study drawing
at the Ecole
de Saint-Luc in Bruxelles, popularized by Hergé.
A year later, Le Monde
published his first drawing dealing with the Vietnam War. This marked
the beginning of his career at Le Monde, where his editorial cartoons
have graced the front page since 1985, in an effort to “acknowledge the
French tradition of political cartoons.”
In 1991, during an exhibition in Tunis, Plantu met the
Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who drew the Star of David on the
Israeli flag for one of Plantu’s drawings. The illustration won an
award called “Prix du document” at the Festival du scoop in Angers,
France. A year later, Arafat and Shimon Pérès autographed one of
Plantu’s drafts before they decided to ratify the Oslo Accords.
In 1998, the French postal service distributed a 3 franc stamp
designed by Plantu, to raise money for the international humanitarian
organization, Médecins Sans Frontières. That same year, to celebrate
the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
UNESCO published several dozen brochures illustrated by Plantu.
Born in Paris in 1951, His drawings have been translated into
Chinese, Japanese, Ukrainian, and Georgian, as well as many other
languages.
