Photos from around the world have captured people using the sign.
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As the hours unfolded and the world learned of the grisly attacks Friday in Paris, Jean Jullien was hanging onto his radio, listening to every single word.
“It was the most spontaneous thing”.
“I express myself visually, so my first reaction was to draw a symbol of peace for Paris”, he said.
They circled around the Peace for Paris sign.
The peace-and-love motif was adopted by Britain’s Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) in the 1950s, before being used by anti-war and “counter-culture” militants in the 1960s. “It was more an instinctive, human reaction than an illustrator’s reaction”.
“Last night I was about to go for dinner”, Jullien told NPR’s Michel Martin.
His original Instagram post saw over 160,000 Likes, and gained millions more after being shared by everyone from politicians to Kardashians.
He has reacted to other news too, sketching images to mark the massacre at the offices of French satirical paper Charlie Hebdo, the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, and the legalization of gay marriage in Ireland. “It is as common as graffiti for an image to emerge in response to tragedy”.
“But I can’t feel pride or happiness because it is such a dark time. It’s undesired exposure. A frightful moment”, Jullien admitted to CNN. I just connected both of them.
People walk across Bay Street as the CN Tower in Toronto shows their support for France.
“Words can sometimes be hard to translate”.
Of its reach, Jullien says he thinks the social role of graphics is a powerful.
“The idea was just for people to have a tool to communicate, and to respond and to share solidarity and peace”.
Celebrities including Kim Kardashian, Justin Bieber, John Legend, Miranda Lambert, Katy Perry, Harry Styles and Fergie all shared the image on their Instagram and Twitter pages and the entire cast of Undateable posed with cards bearing the image in a post. For Jullien, however, that doesn’t matter.
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“As of today, and in the light of the event, I can’t really have any positive thoughts”, he tells Wired.
