Draw the Line Here

Professional Cartoonists’ Organisation

(English PEN £14.92 inc. p&p)

LAST week’s spate of premeditated killings in France, Tunisia and Kuwait, carried out by terrorists associating themselves with Islamic State, have added a tragic poignancy to the outrage that took place at the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo in January.

Regardless of how one views the satirical weekly’s editorial line, it has been widely recognised that the freedom its contributors enjoyed has been won over centuries and, within the European liberal tradition, it is sacrosanct.

That tradition in France stretches back almost 200 years to Honore Daumier, founder of the legendary satirical magazine Charivari, who spent six months in jail for ridiculing the king as Gargantua.

Draw The Line Here is a spontaneous response by British political cartoonists to the murderous violation of those principles in the French capital.

Organised under the auspices of the Professional Cartoonists’ Organisation and backed by English PEN and crowdfunding, it’s a collection of cartoons published in response to the Hebdo massacre.

Those included in this anthology are born out of moral outrage, a profound sense of solidarity and the need to provide an unequivocal riposte to the tyranny of intolerance. “Some cartoons here are gentle, others savage, some merely encapsulate the bafflement and sadness of a world where mockery is met not with the proper response, a shrug, but with murder.

“Again and again the theme is of the fragility of the sceptical, laughing pencil — its simplicity and its splendour, the opposite of the vainglorious, meaningless squalor of the gun and the bomb,” Libby Purves writes aptly in the foreword.

“The glory of the art is in its freedom, its courage, its willingness to dance light-footed over dangerous ground. Not with malice or threat, but in the name of freedom, curiosity, and argument.”

The phrase “the pen is mightier than the sword” might well be something of a cliche but it encapsulates the belief and intentions of both the individual artists and those who made this publication possible.

The power of satire to daily put those who abuse power and privilege in their place, in whatever shape or form, should not be underestimated.

Daumier’s incarceration might have been one of the first resulting from this intent but it certainly wasn’t the last. In March Turkish cartoonists Bahad?

Baruter and Ozer Aydogan were sentenced to 11 months in prison for ridiculing President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a sentence later commuted to a hefty fine.

Their case, alongside hundreds of others, populate the PEN international list of men and women, from Algeria to Zimbabwe, who are regularly harassed, detained, tried and imprisoned because they dare to poke fun at those in power.

Amnesty International has adopted Iranian female cartoonist Atena Farghadani as a prisoner of conscience. Farghadani, 28, has just been sentenced to 12 years and nine months in prison for an array of charges, among them “insulting members of parliament through paintings.”

Some of the profits from Draw the Line Here will go towards English PEN’s free speech campaigns. As Robert Sharp states in the introduction, perhaps the most pleasing aspect of the book is that the contributors “have used their own freedom of expression to defend the free speech rights of others.”

• Draw The Line Here can be ordered from thegreatbritishbookshop.co.uk/book/pro-cartoonists-organisation/draw-the-line-here