Plantu celebrates his 40th anniversary at Le Monde with an interview by Frédéric Potet,
a portfolio of over two dozen of his 19,000 cartoons through the years, and an entire issue without a single photograph but laden exclusively with Jean Plantureux cartoons — the very first of which, in 1972, featured his famous peace dove and concerned, to no one's surprise, the Vietnam war. 
One of the portfolio images shows, incredibly enough, Saddam Hussein's Iraq at a time (in 1990) when the butcher of Baghdad was known to have weapons of mass destruction (which it used on its own Kurds) and to torture children in Baghdad prisons; at a time when the United Nations was not being praised to the skies for its alleged role as the neutral arbiter of what constitutes human rights as well as of what constitutes rightful military intervention; and at a time, naturally, when America was not being demonized for having the temerity of invading Iraq to overthrow the perpetrator of those crimes.
Comment voyez-vous votre rôle au "Monde" ?
On me dit souvent que mes dessins ont une fonction d'édito. Si tel est le but que je recherche, je ne prétends surtout pas être un éditorialiste. Disons que je fais comme si je produisais un édito chaque jour, mais un édito qui flirte avec l'interdit, le subjectif et qui descend parfois en dessous de la ceinture. En fait, je suis un dessinateur qui se prend pour un journaliste dans un monde médiatique où beaucoup de journalistes se prennent pour des caricaturistes.
