Magazine publishes a special issue a decade after the attack

Exactly 10 years after the jihadist attack that killed most of its editorial staff, France’s Charlie Hebdo has published a special issue to show that its cause is still alive.

Things changed for France on January 7, 2015, marking with bloodshed the end of all deliberate naivety about the threat of militant Islam.

Brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi burst into a meeting at the satirical weekly’s Paris office and murdered its star cartoonists Cabu, Wolinski, Charb and Tignous.

In total, the brothers killed 12 people, including a Muslim policeman who was on duty outside. Two days later, police cornered them and shot them dead at a sign-making business near Charles-de-Gaulle airport.

That same day, Amedy Coulibaly, Cherif’s former prison associate, killed four Jews in a synchronized hostage situation 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 and has a circulation (print and online combined) of around 50,000.

He does so from an office whose whereabouts are kept secret and with personnel protected by bodyguards.

But in an editorial in Tuesday’s commemorative edition, the paper’s largest shareholder said its spirit of obscene anti-religious irreverence was still very much alive.

“The urge to laugh will never go away,” said Laurent Saurisseau, also known as Riss, a cartoonist who survived the Jan. 7 attack with a bullet to the shoulder.

“Satire has a virtue that has helped us overcome these tragic years: optimism. If people want to laugh it is because they want to live.

“Laughter, irony and caricature are manifestations of optimism,” he wrote.

Also in the 32-page special are the 40 winning entries in a cartoon contest on the theme “Laughing at God.”

One contains an image of a cartoonist asking, “Is it okay to draw a picture of a man who draws a picture of a man who draws a picture of Muhammad?”

Charlie Hebdo and Hypercacher attacks They now appear as the opening to a grim and deadly period in modern France, during which – for a time – fear of jihadist terrorism became part of everyday life.

In November 2015, gun attacks occurred at the Bataclan theater and nearby bars in Paris. The following July, 86 people were murdered on the seafront in Nice.

Some 300 French people have died in Islamist attacks in the last decade.

Today the frequency has decreased drastically and the defeat of the Islamic State group It means there is no longer a base of support in the Middle East.

But the murderous individual, self-radicalized through the Internet, remains a constant threat in France as elsewhere.

The original pretext for the Charlie Hebdo murders – caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad – is now strictly banned from publications around the world.

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 discussion about free speech.

And this week the trial opens in Paris of a Pakistani man who – shortly before Paty’s murder – seriously injured two people with a butcher knife in the Paris offices that he thought Charlie-Hebdo was still using (in fact, it was time that excited).

So, as with every anniversary since 2015, the question being asked once again in France is: what, if anything, has changed? And what survives (if anything) of the great outpouring of international support, whose wake-up call in the days after the murders was Je suis Charlie?

It was then that a march of two million people through the center of Paris was joined by heads of state and government from countries around the world at the invitation of then-president François Hollande.

Today, pessimists say the battle is over and lost. The chances of a humorous newspaper one day taking up the cudgel against Islam – as Charlie Hebdo used to do regularly and luridly against Christianity and Judaism – are nil.

Worse still, for these people, is that parts of the political left in France are also clearly distancing themselves from Charlie Hebdo, accusing it of becoming too anti-Islam and adopting far-right positions.

Jean-Luc Melenchon, leader of the France Insoumise party, accused the weekly of being a “carrier of (the right-wing magazine) Valeurs Actuels,” and Sandrine Rousseau of the Greens called Charlie Hebdo “misogynistic and sometimes racist.” “.

This, in turn, has led to accusations directed at the far left of having betrayed Je suis Charlie’s spirit of free speech to gain electoral support among French Muslims.

But speaking on the eve of the anniversary, Riss – who counted the dead among his best 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 more deeply rooted in society than one might think. When you talk to people, you can see that it is very much alive. It is a mistake to think that everything has disappeared.

“It’s part of our collective memory.”