Exactly 10 years after a jihadist gun attack killed most of its editorial staff, France’s Charlie Hebdo has released a special edition to show its cause is still working.
Things changed for France on January 7, 2015, marking the end of any willful naivete about the threat of militant Islamism with bloodshed.
Brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi stormed a meeting in the Paris offices of the satirical weekly, killing its star cartoonists Cabu, Wolinski, Charb and Tignous.
In all, the brothers killed 12 people, including a Muslim policeman who was on duty outside. Two days later, police cornered and shot them dead at a sign-making company near Charles-de-Gaulle airport.
That same day, he saw Amedy Coulibaly—a former prison associate of Cherif—kill four Jews in a synchronized hostage-taking at a supermarket in eastern Paris. Coulibaly – who was then shot dead by the police – had killed a policewoman the day before.
A decade later, Charlie Hebdo continues to publish a weekly edition and has a circulation (print and online combined) of around 50,000 copies.
He does this from an office whose whereabouts are kept secret and staffed by bodyguards.
But in an editorial in Tuesday’s commemorative edition, the paper’s major shareholder said its spirit of brazen anti-religious irreverence was still very much alive.
“The desire to laugh will never go away,” said Laurent Saurisseau – also known as Riss – a cartoonist who survived the January 7 attack with a bullet to the shoulder.
“Satire has one virtue that has carried us through these tragic years – optimism. If people want to laugh, it’s because they want to live.
“Laughter, irony and caricature are all manifestations of optimism,” he wrote.
Also in a special edition on 32 pages there are 40 winning works in the caricature competition on the theme “Laughing at God”.
One features a picture of a cartoonist asking, “Is it okay to draw a picture of a man drawing a picture of a man drawing a picture of Muhammad?”
Charlie Hebdo and Hypercacher attacks they appear now as a prelude to a dark and deadly period in modern France, during which – for a time – the fear of jihadist terrorism became a part of everyday life.
In November 2015, there were armed attacks on the Bataclan theater and nearby bars in Paris. The following July, 86 people were killed on the promenade in Nice.
About 300 French people have died in Islamist attacks in the last decade.
Today, the frequency has dropped sharply, and the defeat of the Islamic State group means that there is no longer a support base in the Middle East.
But the killer, self-radicalized via the Internet, remains a constant threat in France as elsewhere.
The original pretext for the Charlie Hebdo killings – cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad – are now strictly banned from publication everywhere.
In 2020, a professor of French Samuel Paty he was beheaded outside his school by jihadists after showing one of Charlie’s caricatures in a free speech debate.
And this week in Paris, the trial of a Pakistani begins who – shortly before Patyn’s murder – seriously injured two people with a butcher knife in the Paris offices that he thought were still being used by Charlie-Hebdo (actually moved long ago).
As with every anniversary since 2015, the question arises again in France: what – if anything – has changed? And what – if anything – survived the great outpouring of international support, whose main appeal in the days after the murders was Je suis Charlie?
Then, at the invitation of the then president François Hollande, heads of state and government from all countries of the world joined the two-million-strong parade through the center of Paris.
Today, pessimists say the battle is over and lost. The chances of a witty newspaper ever taking a beating against Islam—the way Charlie Hebdo regularly and harshly did against Christianity and Judaism—are nil.
Worse for these people, parts of the political left in France are now clearly distancing themselves from Charlie Hebdo, accusing it of becoming overly anti-Islamic and adopting far-right views.
Jean-Luc Melenchon, who leads the France Unbowed party, accused the weekly of being a “bag carrier for (right-wing magazine) Valeurs Actuels”, and the Greens’ Sandrine Rousseau said Charlie Hebdo was “misogynistic and occasionally racist”.
This in turn led to accusations leveled against the far left that it had betrayed the free speech spirit of Je suis Charlie in order to win electoral support among French Muslims.
But speaking ahead of the anniversary, Riss – who counted the dead among his greatest friends and says not a day goes by without reliving a moment of the attack – refused to give up hope.
“I mean [the Charlie spirit] is more deeply anchored in society than one might think. When you talk to people, you can see that it is very alive. It is a mistake to think that everything is gone.
“It’s part of our collective memory.”
