Charlie Hebdo ten years after the Islamist massacre: Provocative humor continues

The crime was committed on January 7, 2015 by the brothers Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, who were born in the early 1980s in France to Algerian parents. During the attack, they shot a total of twelve people and injured eleven others, four of them seriously.

On the fateful day, as well as every Wednesday, the members of the editorial team met at ten in the morning in their Paris office on rue Nicolas-Appert for a regular meeting. An hour and a half later, the perpetrators began their murderous action when, masked and armed with automatic rifles, they first entered the wrong building with number 6, where the editorial archive was located.

When they realized their mistake, they burst into the entrance with number 10, where they shot the maintenance man in the entrance area. Then, on the stairs, they ran into cartoonist Corinne Rey, who they forced to lead them to the first floor and enter the code on the armored security door from the editorial headquarters.

As soon as the attackers entered, they opened unbridled fire, shouting “Allahu Akbar” (The battle is great) and “We have avenged the prophet!”. They alluded to the repeated publication of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in the past, due to which the editorial office was a long-term target of threats and one arson attack.

The assassins mainly targeted the head of the weekly Stéphane Charbonnier, who published under the nickname Charb. In the storm of about 50 bullets, not only he and his bodyguard, whom he had assigned to him by the police, but also eight other employees of the newsroom were killed. The cartoonist Reyová, who was hiding under the table, escaped without injury.

After the flash action, which lasted less than two minutes, they ran out of the building and fled in a prepared car. On the run, one of the assassins killed a policeman with a close-range blow to the head, who was left lying wounded on the sidewalk after the previous shootout.

Two days later, special intervention units eliminated both bombers in a shootout at a printer near the Paris airport.

After the attack, Charlie Hebdo found itself in a difficult situation, the weekly was paralyzed after the violent death of key workers.

“We had to rebuild the editorial office, find people who would be willing to join us. Some stayed, others left,” today’s director of the weekly, cartoonist Laurent Sourisseau, known under the nickname Riss, confirmed to Ouest-France.

According to him, the weekly finally stabilized without deviating in any way from the line of harsh humor, which is not to everyone’s taste in France. Since its inception, Charlie Hebdo has profiled itself as a left-wing, strongly secularist and anti-religious weekly whose articles and cartoons mock not only Islam, but also Catholicism and Judaism.

Charlie Hebdo does not intend to give up its focus in the future either. Precisely in connection with the tenth anniversary of the assassination, the editors launched a competition under the motto Rire de Dieu (Mock God), in which they are looking for the best anti-religious cartoons around the world.

The challenge was addressed by the weekly to authors who are already “tired of life in a society controlled by God and religion”. People who “don’t want to constantly listen to lectures about supposed good and evil” and “are fed up with how religious leaders dictate our lives” should sign up.

The deadline for the topics was mid-December and the best ones are to be published in the issue of Charlie Hebdo, which will be published this week exceptionally on Tuesday (not on Wednesday as usual), so that it happens exactly on the day of the sad anniversary.

“It will be a double issue of 32 pages with a circulation of 300,000 copies. It will be on sale for two weeks for five euros (126 CZK),” revealed today’s editor-in-chief of the weekly, Gérard Biard, who survived the January 2015 attack thanks to the fact that he was on vacation in London at the time.

An exclusive survey by the renowned sociological institute Ifop on the topic “The French and the right to caricature, blasphemy and freedom of speech” is to be part of the publication.

The title page, which is traditionally particularly explosive and provocative, is expected with great interest. “We already have the idea, but it will be a surprise,” said editor-in-chief Biard. Undoubtedly, it will be “in the spirit of Charlie Hebdo, attacked but unsullied”.

The historian of the Paris Sorbonne, Laurent Bihl, sees a certain shift in the mission of caricature in recent years. According to him, authors today no longer have to fight against bans and signs of legislative censorship, as was the case in the beginning, but against the prevailing indifference, he said according to Le Figaro.

“The fear is obvious,” admitted Bihl, referring to the frequency of terrorist attacks, not only in France. He considers cartoon satire to be a “social eye” that has its place in the life of a society confronted with many challenges. “The nobility of the caricature lies in the fact that it comes unmasked,” added the historian.