Cartoonist for prominent French newspaper quits after editor issues apology over drawing mocking trans people, incest victims
A cartoonist for a prominent French newspaper announced Wednesday that he was quitting his job after the paper’s editor-in-chief issued an apology over one of his drawings.
Xavier Gorce, described by the Agence France-Presse as a “leading cartoonist” at Le Monde, drew a cartoon commenting on a recent sex-abuse scandal that rocked French intellectual circles.
The drawing received immediate backlash after it was published on Tuesday, with critics calling it transphobic and insensitive to sexual abuse victims.
Le Monde’s editor-in-chief Caroline Monnot agreed, and released an apology saying that the cartoon should not have been published.
“This drawing can indeed be read as relativizing the seriousness of acts of incest, using inappropriate terms towards victims and transgender people,” she said.
On Wednesday, Gorce took to Twitter to announce that he had decided to “immediately stop working with Le Monde,” after the paper’s apology.
“It is a personal, unilateral and definitive decision. Freedom cannot be negotiated. My drawings will continue,” he wrote.
The controversy stems from an explosive tell-all book about 70-year-old Olivier Duhamel, one of the country’s most prominent political scientists and media commentators.
In a book published earlier this month in France, “La Familia Grande,” Duhamel’s stepdaughter, Camille Kouchner, accuses him of sexually abusing his stepson — her twin brother — when he was a teen.
Before the book was published on Jan. 7, it was serialized in Le Monde and in L’Obs magazine.
On Tuesday, Gorce commented on the scandal with a drawing of two penguins chatting, with the smaller of the two asking the other: “If I was abused by the adopted half-brother of the partner of my transgender father who has now become my mother, is that incest?”
Many readers accused Gorce of making light of incest, and of mocking trans people and victims of sex abuse.
“Anything but funny. This drawing is particularly unbearable and reflects a total contempt for the indescribable suffering of many,” tweeted Nicolas Cadène, who runs the government’s Laïcité Observatory, which can be roughly translated to the Office of Secularism.
Gorce replied to Cadène, saying that he’d keep his “reaction in my collection.”
“So do,” Cadène wrote in response. “But above all, think about it. Think about the victims.”
Speaking with the magazine Le Point, the cartoonist, who’d worked at Le Monde for 18 years, said that he was “misunderstood.”
“I have never had a censored drawing and I have always enjoyed great freedom. I guess this drawing must have been judged correct before its publication, otherwise it would not have passed… At the moment, the drawing is still on the site and I refuse to talk about censorship,” he added.
