Of Sex and Politics

An incorrigible French cartoonist searches for his place in a world that is not shocked by sex anymore, writes Joeanna Rebello

It seemed as if the Gallic quarter of the Tower of Babel found alternate accommodation in the lobby of the Alliance Francaise at Marine Lines. This is ground zero of The French Touch—a month-long cultural carousel in India. In that voluble crowd of graffiti fiends, wattlelocked musicians and Saint Vituses, stood a somewhat reclusive 74-yearold. For France’s most popular editorial cartoonist, Georges Wolinski was not quite the picture of levity. In his defence, he’d only just arrived en Inde.
   Later, quarantined from the din, in a library, Georges spoke about his life in art, while his hand reflexively drew a caricature. “I spent my formative years in Tunisia. But my antecedents are foreign—my father was a Polish Jew, and my mother’s roots were Italian,” he says. “My predilection to cartoons goes back to childhood, when the local boys asked the American troops posted in Tunisia for chocolate, I’d ask for American comics. Which was clever, because with comics came the chocolate.”
   When he moved to Paris in 1952, it was architecture he was going to study, but he soon cast off the formality of that line for the flexibility of another. He started contributing cartoons and illustrations to the satirical monthly Hara Kiri (A Wicked and Nasty Magazine’), willing patrons of Georges’ bigamous interests—sex and politics. A commentator wrote of his work in the ’60s and ’70s—‘He talks about sex in a political way, and about politics in a pornographic way’.
   “That is no longer true,” Wolinski says shaking his head. “The climate back then was one of social and moral claustrophobia, with gender roles filed in iron. And my cartoons were an intellectual reprisal to that straitjacketing. So I portrayed women provocatively, asking for pleasure, dominant. After all, a country whose women are free, is a country free. That’s the sign of a real democracy,” says this delegate of the feminist-communist camp.
   Until the Second World War women were granted limited rights. It was only after the War that the right to abortion and the pill passed social cordons. But right up to the late ’60s, the kettle of malcontent was on the boil. Artists like Georges and his companions, Francoise Cavanna and Jean Marc-Reiser (co-founders of Hara Kiri) broke ideological bread together, and in the manner of their art, told acid truths about France of the day. “In the ’50s and ’60s you had the pleasure of shocking people and wresting a reaction. Our job is precisely that —to stir the hornet’s nest,” he says. If his cartoons appear to have dulled in their obscenity, it is not the art that has grown tame, but the viewer who has graduated with new degrees in sex education. “Sex has become ‘banalise’, commonplace. When you have pornography so blatant on TV today, erotic cartoons lose their flavour and intent—they become impotent.”
   He has been called names—vulgaire, qu'obsédé sexual (sex obsessed) and said to have mauvais gout (bad taste). “I am very glad when they say these things. Yes, I am obsessed with sex, and so are my friends. I’ve made love with many women…’” he says. “Made love to,” admonishes a hanger-on in the background.
   He launched his fusillade of political cartoons in May 1968, when France’s epochal student revolt erupted, upsetting the conservative matrices of de Gaulle’s France. “Somebody asked me for a political drawing one day, and I was surprised to open Action (a daily) one morning, and find my cartoon there,” he says. Georges also contributed his ire to the magazine he co-founded, L’Enrage. But
when he was commissioned advertising work by the corporate bourgeoisie, his political friends weren’t happy. “They said I’d sold out to capitalism. But that didn’t change my principles. I’ve always fought consumerism,” he says, placidly sawing a fillet of grilled chicken.
   From the ’70s, as France pedalpushed capitalism, Georges’ left-wing commentaries took flight to publications like Le Journal du Dimanche (The JDD), L’umanite, Paris Match, Nouvel Observateur, L’Echo des Savanes and Charlie Hebdo. “I could draw anything I wanted to,” he says, “Before this thin-skinned age, you could joke about religion and paedophilia, but not today.”
   With freedom came threats, mild threats. “Complaints have been filed against me on and off,” he says, “And 10 years ago, the Front National party graffitied the exterior of my apartment for one of my cartoons. But it’s never been more severe than that.” He is lucky migration took him to France in the ’40s. “The cultural winds in France are cooler now than ever before in modern history. Back then the Bibliotheque Nationale confined its libertine literature (erotica and pornography) to a cold storage in a part of the building, nicknamed L’Enfer (hell). Now, proof of France’s liberal complexion is a recently concluded exhibition of this art called L’Enfer de la bibliotheque.”
   In 2005, Jacque Chirac conferred on him the Légion d’Honneur . Georges’ oeuvre has expanded in the recent past to include travel sketches of Cambodia, Kabul, Cuba and Thailand. And he continues to inquire after politics and society through caricature. His inquiries in India are differently constituted. He wonders why newspapers here carry retrograde cartoons like Beetle Bailey and Peanuts. “Why is there no new, young material?” he asks, and then, “Do you have pornography on TV here like they do in France?” And one last question, “Are you free for dinner?”.