Imaginary interview with Sennep
by Charactorium · Sennep (1894 — 1982) · Visual Arts · Society · 6 min read
Paris, an afternoon in the 1950s. In an apartment on the grand boulevards, one room serving as a studio, the drawing table groans under the morning newspapers. A sixty-year-old man, dark jacket and glasses, sets down his pen still glistening with India ink and agrees to recount half a century spent sketching the Republic.
—Let's start with the name by which all Paris knows you. Where does this "Sennep" that signs your drawings come from?
People think I come from an old family of engravers, but nothing could be further from the truth: I was born Jean-Jacques Charles Pennès in 1894, under a Republic that had already made itself comfortable. The real name sounded wrong at the bottom of a sketch, so I did what I did to my subjects — I turned it around. I took the syllables of Pennès, I reversed them, and Sennep came out of the inkwell like a politician emerges from a caricature: the same, but unrecognizable and yet recognizable. It was a game, a draftsman's pirouette. A caricaturist who distorts the faces of others could well start by twisting his own.
A caricaturist who distorts the faces of others could well start by twisting his own.
—Your first targets were the great names of the Third Republic. How did you capture a Herriot or a Blum on paper?
You don't draw a man, you draw his silhouette in people's memory. Édouard Herriot always made it easy for me: that roundness of a jovial radical, that pipe, that provincial professor's bonhomie. Léon Blum was the opposite — tall, glasses, that slightly weary elegance. I pushed a nose, a chin, until the line became a signature. My readers eventually identified the man at a single glance, even before reading the caption. That's the secret of the caricature: it's not likeness you're after, it's the jolt of recognition, that moment when the reader smiles because they understood before reading.
It's not likeness you're after, it's the jolt of recognition.
—Were you never afraid of making enemies among the powerful people you ridiculed?
Flatter the powerful? That's not my job, and besides, they do it among themselves. Under the Third Republic, I ruthlessly caricatured the radical Herriot and the socialist Blum alike, without looking at their label. A caricaturist who holds back is nothing but a flattering portraitist, a medal-maker. The funny thing is that politicians are less offended than you might think: many collected their own caricatures, delighted to exist enough to be distorted. I was told that some were mainly worried about disappearing from my drawings. To be forgotten by the caricaturist, in that Paris, was already to lose the election.
To be forgotten by the caricaturist, in that Paris, was already to lose the election.
—Let's talk about the studio. What does the making of a drawing actually look like, from morning to evening?
My day begins with the newspapers and the news: you have to know the news before everyone else, feel which way the political wind is blowing. Seated at the drawing table, I search for the angle with the grease pencil — the tool for the first draft, the one that catches an expression before it escapes. I sketch ten faces, I throw away nine. In the afternoon, I move on to the pen and India ink, and that's where everything is decided: that deep black that snaps on the paper forgives no hesitation. A botched line, and you start the sheet over. The drawing has to go out in the evening to appear the next day — the press knows no laziness of the pencil.
That deep black that snaps on the paper forgives no hesitation.
—You inherit a long tradition of draftsmen. Whom do you owe your style to?
You never invent anything alone with a pen in hand. I claim the greats of the past century, especially Daumier, who knew that a well-caricatured minister is worth ten pamphlets. From him comes that simple and terrible idea: exaggerate a nose, a chin, a pair of glasses until the man is both ridiculous and perfectly himself. My drawing table, my pens, my inkwells are just the same tools he wielded, barely changed. Press drawing is a craft of transmission: you receive a gesture, you dip it in your time, and you hand it back a little sharper than you received it.
![19e gala de l'union des artistes, cirque d'hiver : [Programme] : 2 avril 1949](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:19e_gala_de_l%27union_des_artistes%2C_cirque_d%27hiver_-_Programme_-_2_avril_1949_-_btv1b10117036k_%2807_of_59%29.jpg)
—The 1930s were fiery. How do you work in the midst of a Republic shaken by crises?
Ministerial instability was my daily bread: I had barely fixed a minister in ink when he fell, and I had to start over with his successor. On February 6, 1934, when the riots bloodied the Place de la Concorde, I understood that the drawing was no longer entertainment — it took sides, whether you wanted it or not. Then came 1936, the Popular Front, Blum in power, and passions unleashed on both sides. I sketched every week in the most widely read weeklies in Paris, like Candide, where the cover drawing was a weapon people expected. In such times, a line could make or break a reputation, and we all knew it.
I had barely fixed a minister in ink when he fell, and I had to start over with his successor.
—Your drawings of the Popular Front bear witness to a divided France. Where do you draw the line between mockery and hatred?
The line is thin, and the times often trampled it. Between 1936 and 1938, I commented on the Blum government experiment week after week, in the fever of opinion battles. A caricature wounds, that's its job; but it must wound the public man, not the man. The day you stop laughing and only hate, you've dropped the satirist's pen for the pamphleteer's, and it's no longer the same craft. I stood in the corridors of the Palais Bourbon, I watched those figures of power, and I tried to keep that distance that allows you to caricature an opponent without wanting his hide. It's a difficult discipline, in times of discord.
A caricature must wound the public man, not the man.
—Then came the war, the Occupation. What becomes of a caricaturist when the free press falls silent?
A caricaturist without freedom is an archer whose string has been cut. The defeat of 1940 and the regime it installed muzzled political caricature: you don't laugh under a hand that watches the inkwell. Drawing lives on irreverence, and irreverence had become a crime. I saw that Paris of the press that I had known bustling close down, those newsrooms on the grand boulevards where you dropped off your drawings between two coffees. We had to wait for the Liberation of 1944 for the pen to regain its right to sting. It's hard to measure, when the press is free, how fragile that right to mock the powerful is, something a single winter can sweep away.
A caricaturist without freedom is an archer whose string has been cut.
—After the war, you became the pencil of Le Figaro. What was that daily rendezvous with thousands of readers like?
From 1946, I became the staff caricaturist for Le Figaro, and my life took on the rhythm of the daily — literally. I was told that many readers, in the morning, looked for my drawing first, even before the editorial, to understand the previous day's event in a glance and a smile. It's an honor that obliges you: every day, you have to find the idea, fix it in ink, take it to the newsroom on the Champs-Élysées where it's turned into a plate for printing. No respite, no inspiration failure allowed. The day's drawing is a small debt you repay to the reader each morning, and which you contract again immediately.
The day's drawing is a small debt you repay to the reader each morning.
—You accompanied the end of the Fourth Republic and the birth of the Fifth. Does the line change with the regimes?
Regimes come and go, the pen remains — but it adapts to the faces. The Fourth Republic offered me the same ballet of instability I had known before the war, those cabinets that fell faster than I could draw them. Then 1958, the return of the General and the Fifth Republic: a figure of another stature, more monumental, which demanded a different line, almost a different breath. A caricaturist lives on these ruptures; each new Republic is a new gallery of noses to discover. I eventually understood that my bound albums, those collections where the published drawings are gathered, formed, without my intending it, a chronicle of a whole half-century of French political life.
—At the end of this long career, what remains of a drawing that, by nature, was meant to live only a day?
That's the paradox of my trade: I make ephemeral things. A press drawing is born for one morning and should die in the evening, crushed by the next day's news. And yet the albums of caricatures give them a second life — those bound collections that gather the best and save it from the wastebasket. If I could imagine people leafing through my drawings a century from now, I think they would no longer seek to laugh at Herriot or Blum, but to understand how those people walked, spoke, carried themselves. The caricaturist ends up an archivist in spite of himself: by constantly distorting the faces of an era, he preserves its imprint more faithfully than many photographs.
By constantly distorting the faces of an era, he preserves its imprint more faithfully than many photographs.
This imaginary interview was generated by artificial intelligence from sources documented in Sennep'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.