A teacher pierced with seven knives, supported by a handful of citizens who use his body as a shield while proclaiming: “We are all behind you”. This drawing, signed Riss and published on the front page of Charlie Hebdo a few days after the assassination of Dominique Bernard in Arras by an Islamist terrorist, in October 2023, is one of the twelve caricatures selected by the association Dessinez Create Liberté (DCL), as part of a vast project on press cartoons carried out in collaboration with the Ile-de-France region.
Ten years after the attack on the editorial staff of Charlie Hebdo, and four years after the assassination of Samuel Paty – killed for having shown his students a caricature of Mohammed – the association and the region worked on an “educational tool” allowing teachers to address the subjects of freedom of expression, secularism and caricature, and which will be distributed in establishments in the region from next January.
After specifying RMC and BFMTVon November 13, that neither caricatures of the prophet, nor caricatures of “Jesus or the Pope” will be presented “as part of this program”, the president of the Ile-de-France region Valérie Pécresse presented to the press, this Friday the 22nd, the designs finally retained by DCL. The project, called “Caricature & Democracy”, will be composed of twelve historical and contemporary drawings, ranging from the caricature of King Louis-Philippe published in November 1831 in the eponymous newspaper The Caricatureat the famous “Family Dinner” which turned into fistfights over the Dreyfus affair, published in Le Figaro in February 1898, through the famous front page ofHara-kiri “Tragic ball in Colombey”, published on the death of General de Gaulle in November 1970.
To address the subjects of secularism and criticism of religion, several drawings were chosen, notably the one produced by the designer Coco for Charlie Hebdo in April 2017 representing the leaders of the three main cults entitled “Humour, a sacred principle?”, and the front page representing, six years later and in the same newspaper, the death of Dominique Bernard. Twelve decryption and recontextualization sheets relating to the drawings, designed by DCL, will accompany these caricatures, allowing teachers who wish to do so to rely on this educational support as part of their courses.
“There is an undeniable self-censorship among our teachers”
Concerning the caricatures of Mohammed, Jesus, the Pope or other religious figures, absent from this program, the press cartoonist and member of DCL Lodi Marasescu specifies that “educational resources about these drawings are already online on the association’s website“, and that teachers who wish “are free to add them” to their courses on the subject. “There is an imperative need to start discussions with students without there being any taboos”, added Pierre Liscia, special delegate for secularism and citizenship for the Ile-de-France region.
The chosen drawings, already “tested in several high schools” where they aroused “strong interest among young people”, according to Valérie Pécresse, will be presented to students “who were aged 5 to 8 years old” at the time of the 2015 attacks. While the latter “probably keep only a fragmentary memory of what, of Charlie Hebdo at the Hyper-kosher and the Bataclan, was an immense national trauma, the stakes are all the more important”, added the president of the Ile-de-France region, specifying that she had “grabbed the hand extended by the association Dessinez Create Liberté”, – created by Charlie Hebdo and SOS Racisme in 2015.
“Let’s be clear, since this tragedy [l’assassinat de Samuel Paty]”, there is an undeniable self-censorship of our teachers regarding these subjects”, she believes. In parallel with this operation, an inter-high school press cartoon competition will also be organized by the region, whose theme for the year 2025 will be “the fight against disinformation”. “It is the most beautiful tribute that can be paid to the victims of the attack of January 7, 2015”, concludes Valérie Pécresse.