Cabu

With his unkempt mop of hair, round glasses, twinkling eyes and dreamy air, Jean Cabut looked like an amiable and amused adolescent who had strayed into old age without noticing. He was, almost literally, an eternal teenager, something he was happy to admit. “I still love Jacques Trenet. I think you always love the things you loved when you were 15,” he said.

Cabut, always known by the signature on his cartoons Cabu, was widely acclaimed in France as one of the country’s finest caricaturists. He was killed along with several colleagues when terrorists attacked the offices of the magazine Charlie Hebdo.

A pillar of the country’s satirical press, he also contributed to the weekly newspaper Le Canard Enchaîné, among others. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a leading figure in the French student riots of 1968, now a Euro MP, who had known him since that time, described him as, “one of the warmest, gentlest men there could be. Hatred was alien to him”.

Cabu continued to take drawing lessons even when he was 70. “You can fall into a routine when you draw,” he said. “The interesting thing is to try to make your drawings a little more fresh.” After a career lasting 60 years, and an estimated 35,000 works, it was a commendable aim.

He was born in 1938 in Châlons-sur-Marne. His father was a technology teacher at the local polytechnic, his mother a housewife. His talent for drawing bloomed early. Aged 12 he won a bicycle in an artistic competition organised by a Catholic magazine, and two years later he was editing a school magazine, P’titFums. At 15 he was drawing for a local newspaper, L’Union de Reims, which involved weekly sessions immortalising the councillors — good practice, he later noted, for sketching French politicians.

In his late teens, he was sent to Paris to study at the École Estienne for artistic professions. He was called up by the French army and went to Algeria. He continued to draw, getting published in the army journal Bled, and managed to contribute to Paris Match. He came away from the experience with strong antimilitarist convictions which would feature prominently in his work. “The two great taboos when it comes to satire remain the same: religion and the army,” he said.

Demobilised and back in Châlons, Cabu made the acquaintance of Isabelle Monin, a woman from a provincial bourgeois background who was already a young mother of four children with an absent husband. As her first marriage disintegrated, they fell in love and a complicated period in his life followed. Eventually when she had divorced they married and had a son, Emmanuel, who grew up to become a famed singer under the name Mano Solo.

Now with responsibilities for five children, Cabu was already well known in the Paris media and had joined the newly founded Hara Kiri, the forerunner of Charlie Hebdo, not long after leaving the army. This deliberately lewd and cynical magazine, which gloried in bad taste and in the disapproval of General de Gaulle’s wife Yvonne, enjoyed considerable success in France, and revelled in the epithets bête et méchant (stupid and nasty) originally levelled at it by an indignant reader.

In these years, Cabu also created one of his classic characters for Pilote magazine, where he was taken on by the creator of Astérix, René Goscinny. This was “Le Grand Duduche” who, with his thick bob of hair, glasses and distracted look, was an obvious alter ego. He is Cabu’s only positive character.

Arguably, though, his greatest creation, only a few years later, was “the beauf”, the epitome of the unthinking provincial philistine. Originally a contraction of beau-frère (brother-in-law), this coinage of Cabu’s has entered everyday French language, and he was called on to explain its meaning on countless occasions, doing so with unfailing good grace.

In short, a beauf is the epitome of the average Frenchman, a chauvinistic fount of unreflectingly held second-hand opinions and general averageness. In his first incarnation, the beauf was a pastis-drinking pétanque-playing French redneck modelled on a man Cabu had seen in a café in Châlons. The beauf, a racist, usually voted on the right (Chirac, Le Pen), but Cabu on occasion had him lean towards the Communist party. In recent years, “the beauf” appeared in the pages of Le Canard Enchaîné and had acquired a ponytail, designer stubble and dark glasses, and a job in communication. Use of the term remains very much a social marker in France even today.

Cabu’s work was always founded on observation. Reality, he maintained, could always enrich his work. In the early days of Charlie Hebdo he used to travel round the country practising a kind of “sketcho-reportage,” capturing local types and phenomena, often drawing “blind” so that his subjects — anything from people at a cattle market to a Benedictine abbey — remained unaware of what he was doing.

Cabu’s range was remarkable. In addition to satirical journals, he also contributed to Jazz Hot magazine — jazz being one of his great passions — to dailies such as Libération and Le Monde, and to television. For a few years in the 1970s and 1980s, he even took part in a children’s TV show, Récré A2, an improbably bland environment where his unassuming kindness came to the fore and his satirical bent took a backseat. More obviously up his street was Droit de réponse, a polemical discussion programme of the 1980s where his drawings, rattled off quickly in response to the usually heated arguments between guests, were designed to “pour oil on the fire”.

If Cabu’s kindness never seemed to change, his vision if anything grew more acerbic over the years, his social and political satire more trenchant. Nicolas Sarkozy was a favourite target, portrayed with horn-like tufts and a hint of Dracula. In 2006, it was his drawing of Muhammad on the cover of Charlie Hebdo that defied the Islamic prohibition on representation. Following a wave of fundamentalist attacks, it shows the prophet with his hands over his eyes, weeping, and saying “It’s tough being loved by idiots.” “Muhammed: the fundamentalists get out of control” runs the banner.

He and Isabelle were divorced in 1976. She died in 2013. He later remarried and is survived by his second wife, Véronique. Emmanuel, his son from his first marriage, had HIV and died in 2010.

Cabu remained modest and did not overestimate the power of his art. “You can’t change much with a drawing. It’s like a song. It gives you pleasure, but it shouldn’t be allowed too much importance,” he said. “If it was impossible to overcome stupidity, that would have been done a long time ago. Stupidity is our raw material. Our friend is doubt, our enemy is faith.”

Cabu, cartoonist, was born on January 13, 1938. He died in the terrorist attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo magazine on January 7, 2015, aged 76