Imaginary interview with Gébé
by Charactorium · Gébé (1929 — 2004) · Visual Arts · Literature · 6 min read
Autumn 1997, a Parisian newsroom cluttered with drawing boards and cold cups. Between deadlines, a man with a modest line and gentle irony agrees to put down his pencil. Georges Blondeaux, whom everyone calls Gébé, speaks softly, as if afraid of waking his own drawings.
—Before satirical journalism, you led a very different life. How does an industrial draftsman become a caricaturist?
Before the caricatures, there were the locomotives. At the SNCF, I spent my days hunched over a technical drawing board, tracing machine plans: connecting rods, axles, a whole little people of mechanics that had to be rendered to the tenth of a millimeter. You'd think that's far from press drawing, and yet no — I learned there the precise line, economy of means, the idea that a good drawing says exactly what it must, without smudging. When I finally dropped the ruler and compass for the pen and India ink, I didn't throw everything away: I simply replaced machines with men, who are, after all, slightly funnier and much more poorly tuned mechanisms.
I replaced machines with men, mechanisms a little funnier and much more poorly tuned.
—Where does the name Gébé, by which you are known, come from?
There's no mystery, and that's what I like about it. My name is Georges Blondeaux: G, B. Say them out loud, one after the other, and you get “Gébé.” That's the whole secret. I could have looked for a grand nom de plume, something that snaps on a cover, but that wouldn't have been honest with the character. A press cartoonist is not a statue, it's a signature at the bottom of a panel, thrown quickly, forgotten the next week. So two letters were enough. My initials serve as my pseudonym just as my pencil served as my livelihood: unpretentious, with the bare minimum. I've always thought you say more by taking away than by adding.
You always say more by taking away than by adding.
—You were one of the figures of Hara-Kiri, that paper that called itself “stupid and mean.” What did that motto really mean?
“Stupid and mean” was a flag we waved laughing, to get ahead of the enemy. When a power thinks itself serious, respectable, definitive, the best weapon is not the seriousness of the opponent — it's the assumed stupidity, the one that refuses to play the game. At Hara-Kiri, that satirical paper founded by Choron and Cavanna, we had given ourselves the right to turn everything upside down: death, politics, propriety. I wasn't the loudest of the bunch, more the dreamer at the back of the room, but I walked with them. We believed a drawing could be a pebble in the shoe of the era. Small, the pebble, but placed right, it keeps you from walking comfortably.
A drawing is a little pebble in the shoe of the era.
—In 1970, a cover on the death of General de Gaulle led to the paper being banned. Do you remember that turning point?
November 1970. We had headlined the death of General de Gaulle with the disrespect that was our trademark, and the Minister of the Interior brought down the ax: Hara-Kiri Hebdo banned, with a stroke of the administrative pen much sharper than ours. Another would have folded shop. We, we made a step aside — that phrase, you see, will follow me all my life. The following week, the same band of defiant cartoonists relaunched the same paper under another name: Charlie Hebdo was born, not despite censorship, but thanks to it. That's the great blunder of authorities: they think they put out a fire by blowing on it, and they only scatter the sparks further.
They think they put out a fire by blowing on it, and they scatter the sparks further.
—Let's talk about the work that made you famous. How did the utopia L'An 01 come about?
L'An 01 came as a desire to breathe, in 1970, in the pages of Charlie Hebdo. Around us, everything was accelerating: production, consumption, that great race where no one knows anymore what they're running toward. So I drew the opposite — not a revolution with barricades, but a quiet utopia, almost lazy, where one would simply decide to slow down. No leader, no program: each stops when they want, and we watch what remains standing when the machine stops turning. It was after May '68, the air was full of those dreams. Published as an album two years later by Éditions du Square, this little book continued on its own, like good ideas: without my having to push it.
Not a revolution with barricades, but a quiet utopia, almost lazy.
—That phrase, “Stop everything, think”... is it a slogan, a joke, a real proposal?
All three at once, and that's why it stuck. The exact slogan, the one that still runs on walls, is: “Stop everything, think, and it's not sad.” The “it's not sad” counts as much as the rest, we always forget that. I wasn't preaching austerity, tightened belts, gloomy renunciation. I was saying that stopping could be joyful. On the board, I had phrased it differently: the first step aside is that those who want to stop, stop. No order from above, no great evening — just people who, one morning, put down their tools. A utopia doesn't need to be credible to be useful; it just needs to show us that the order of things is not a fatality.
A utopia doesn't need to be credible to be useful.
—How did this comic go from paper to the movie screen?
In 1973, I got the idea to see my little characters move and talk for real. I co-directed the film L'An 01 with Jacques Doillon, who knew what a camera was — I came from the drawing board, a still and silent world where movement is only a suggestion between panels. Moving to film was as if my drawings stepped off the page to walk in the street, bump into passersby, soak up the sun. The whole principle of the film rested on that cheerfulness of stopping: people who, on a sidewalk, decide together to no longer play the game. The shooting itself looked a bit like the utopia it told — a joyful mess where everyone brought their grain.
My drawings stepped off the page to walk in the street, soak up the sun.
—It's said that two great filmmakers lent a hand to this film. What did such company mean to you?
Yes, and I keep a happy astonishment about it. Alain Resnais and Jean Rouch each shot a sequence for L'An 01. See the contrast: me, the former draftsman of SNCF plans, surrounded by two masters, one who had reinvented memory in cinema, the other who planted his camera among men like an ethnologist. That they agreed to come play in my paper utopia said a lot about the times: the boundaries between drawing, film, party, and politics had begun to melt. We didn't ask if we were serious or not. We did it, together, and saw afterward. I think that's the most beautiful definition of a step aside: accepting not to know where you're stepping.
The most beautiful definition of a step aside: accepting not to know where you're stepping.
—Alongside satire, there is a more intimate work, Berck. Where does that story come from?
Berck, in 1974, is the flip side of the joke. There, no “stupid and mean,” no slogan — the silence of a sanatorium, lying bodies, illness taking its time while everything else rushes. I mixed drawing and text in a tone I didn't allow myself elsewhere, more bare, more serious. You think a press cartoonist only knows how to sneer; but the same pen that scratches current events can also rest gently on what hurts. It was a way to say that the step aside is not only leaving work and profit — it's sometimes stopping at someone's bedside, and looking straight at what ordinarily we prefer to caricature so as not to see it.
—In 1992, you took the helm of the reborn Charlie Hebdo. What did you find when you took on that role?
When Charlie Hebdo was resurrected in 1992, after years of silence, I was asked to become editor-in-chief. I found a post I had already held in the days of Hara-Kiri: that of animator of a band, more than boss. A satirical paper is not run like a factory; it stands through discussions, late deadlines, topics turned every which way before choosing the front page. My job was to keep the spirit alive without ever embalming it — let insolence through while ensuring it aimed right. At my age, you no longer run a newsroom to make noise, but because you still believe, obstinately, that a drawing can make someone take their little step aside.
A satirical paper is not run like a factory: it stands through discussions.
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This imaginary interview was generated by artificial intelligence from sources documented in Gébé's profile. It dramatises what the figure might have said based on what we know about them, but does not constitute attested historical testimony. For primary sources and factual documentation, refer to the full profile.