Exactly 10 years after the armed jihadist attack that claimed the lives of most of its editorial staff, the French newspaper Charlie Hebdo issued a special issue to show that its case still stands.
Things changed for France on January 7, 2015, marking the end of all willful naivete about the threat of militant political Islam.
The brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi He stormed a meeting in the Paris office of the satirical weekly, and murdered star cartoonists Capo Wollensky, Sharpe, and Tinos.
In all, 12 people were killed by the brothers, including a Muslim policeman who was on duty abroad. Two days later, police surrounded them and shot them dead at a sign-making shop near Charles de Gaulle Airport.
On the same day, Amedy Coulibaly – who was Sharif's aide in prison – killed four Jews in a simultaneous hostage-taking operation in a supermarket in eastern Paris. Coulibaly – who was later shot dead by police – had killed a policewoman the day before.
A decade later, Charlie Hebdo continues to publish a weekly edition with a circulation (combined print and electronic) of around 50,000 copies.
It does so from an office whose whereabouts are kept secret, and with staff protected by bodyguards.
But in an editorial in Tuesday's commemorative issue, the paper's main contributor said the spirit of blatant anti-religious recklessness is still very much alive.
“The desire to laugh will never go away,” said Laurent Sourisseau – also known as Rhys – a cartoonist who survived the January 7 attack with a bullet in his shoulder.
“There is one virtue that has helped us get through these tragic years, and that is optimism. If people want to laugh, it is because they want to live.
“Laughter, sarcasm, and caricature are all manifestations of optimism,” he wrote.
The 32-page special edition also features the 40 winning entries in a cartoon contest on the theme “Laughing at God.”
One contains an image of a cartoonist asking himself: “Is it okay for us to draw a picture of a man drawing a picture of a man drawing a picture of Muhammad?”
Charlie Hebdo and Hypercacher attacks These events now seem to be a prelude to a bleak and deadly period in modern France, where fear of jihadist terrorism became – for a time – part of daily life.
In November 2015, armed attacks occurred on the Bataclan Theater and nearby bars in Paris. The following July, 86 people were killed in a park in Nice.
About 300 French people were killed in attacks carried out by Islamists in the past decade.
Today the frequency has dropped sharply, and is defeated Islamic State group This means that there is no longer a support base in the Middle East.
But the killer, who was self-radicalized online, remains a continuing threat in France as elsewhere.
The original pretext for the Charlie Hebdo murders – caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad – is now completely banned from print everywhere.
In 2020, A French teacher Samuel Paty He was beheaded outside his school by a jihadist after showing one of Charlie's cartoons in a debate on freedom of expression.
And this week, the trial begins in Paris of a Pakistani man who – shortly before Paty's murder – seriously injured two people with a butcher's cleaver in the Paris offices that were thought to still be used by Charlie Hebdo (in fact they had long since been relocated).
So, as with every anniversary since 2015, the question arises again in France: What – if anything – has changed? What, if anything, remains of this massive outpouring of international support, whose clarion call in the days following the murders was “I am Charlie”?
It happened when heads of state and government from around the world joined a two-million-person march through central Paris at the invitation of then-President François Hollande.
Today, pessimists say that the battle is over and lost. The chances of a humor newspaper taking up the stick against Islam – as Charlie Hebdo regularly and blatantly used against Christianity and Judaism – are zero.
Worse still for these people is that parts of France's political left are now clearly distancing themselves from Charlie Hebdo, accusing it of becoming too Islamophobic and adopting far-right positions.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who leads the Unsubjugated France party, accused the weekly of being a “bag-carrier for (the right-wing magazine) Valor Actuelle,” and Sandrine Rousseau of the Green Party said Charlie Hebdo was “misogynistic and sometimes racist.” “.
This in turn led to accusations against the far left that it had betrayed the free expression spirit of “Je suis Charlie” in order to garner electoral support among French Muslims.
But speaking in the run-up to the anniversary, Rees – who counted the dead among his greatest friends and says not a day goes by without reliving the moment of the attack – refused to give up hope.
“I think (Charlie's spirit) is embedded in the community more deeply 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 has disappeared.”
“It's part of our collective memory.”
