A decade ago, the whole of France seemed to unite in support of Charlie Hebdo, the satirical weekly that had fallen victim to Islamist terrorism.
“Je suis Charlie” T-shirts and banners were everywhere. More than four million people joined marches in support of the magazine across the country. And François Hollande, the Socialist president of the day, promised to defend freedom of expression in the name of the caricaturists and writers among the 12 victims of the attack.
It has not worked out that way, at least according to Charlie Hebdo’s surviving journalists. “During this past decade, the French left has beaten all the records of cowardice and denial,” wrote Laurent Sourisseau, known as Riss, the cartoonist and director of Charlie Hebdo, who was injured in the 2015 attack.
His words appear in an introduction to Charlie Liberté, Le journal de leur vie (Charlie Liberty, the Diary of their Life), a book that pays tribute to those who lost their lives, such as the caricaturists Stéphane Charbonnier, known as Charb, Jean Cabut, who used the name Cabu, and Georges Wolinski.
The work, which was published last month, features examples of their irreverent and often provocative humor, but also virulent criticism of the left-wing politicians, journalists and intellectuals who Riss says continue to turn a blind eye to the Islamist threat in an attempt to win support among Muslim communities, nourishing anti-Semitism in the process.
The denunciation is all the more eye-catching since Charlie Hebdo has itself always been a left-wing journal, according to Gérard Biard, its editor-in-chief. “And it still is today, as much as ever.”
Biard, who escaped the terror attack because he was in London that day, was speaking in an interview with The Times in a Paris office, where the presence of police bodyguards was a reminder of the risks that Charlie Hebdo’s staff continue to face.
He said the magazine tried to maintain the light-hearted impudence that marked its beginnings, but acknowledged that “it’s more complicated now … there are always these threats hanging over us”. He added: “Let’s say we don’t have the same insouciance — although in our editorial room we still aim to produce a newspaper that is still as funny.”
Charlie Hebdo was founded in 1970, when it adopted an overtly mocking tone with the political, religious and social institutions of a French nation that was shedding postwar conservatism.
“The idea was to have a newspaper where you could read what you could not read elsewhere,” Biard said.
Traditionalists often found it indecent, but its readership enjoyed laughing at presidents, business leaders, army generals and clergymen.
“During this past decade, the French left has beaten all the records of cowardice and denial.”
In 2006, the mood changed when Charlie Hebdo published caricatures of Muhammad that had previously appeared in Jyllands-Posten, a Danish newspaper. The move provoked anger in the Muslim world, and Charlie Hebdo became a target.
“We didn’t do that gratuitously,” Biard said. “We didn’t do that saying: ‘There is a controversy and we are going to exploit it.’ ”
He said Charlie Hebdo had acted to defend freedom of expression at a time when most other newspapers “threw in the towel” in the face of Islamist threats by declining to publish the caricatures.
“If you have the right to criticize Emmanuel Macron, if you have the right to criticize a political idea, you must have the right to criticize a religious idea,” he said. “Because if not, it means that the ideas of some citizens, those who are believers, are more important than the ideas of others. And in democracy, that is not tolerable.”
In 2011, the magazine’s office in Paris was firebombed. Four years later, two brothers, Chérif and Saïd Kouachi, entered its offices armed with Kalashnikovs, killing 11 people in the premises and a police officer near by. Amedy Coulibaly, their accomplice, killed a second police officer and four Jewish people in a kosher supermarket in a simultaneous attack. All three terrorists were shot dead by police.
The Islamist killers had tried to depict the attacks as revenge for the caricatures of Muhammad, although Biard, 65, described this as “nonsense”, adding: “It’s just an excuse.”
He argued that the terrorists were not defending the Prophet, but attacking “the foundations of democracy”.
He said that if so many people took to the streets to proclaim Je suis Charlie in the wake of the killings, it was partly out of attachment to the caricaturists who had died and partly out of horror at an attack on the press that was without precedent in France since the war. “It was [an attack on] freedom of expression, the freedom of the press, the right to use satire, the right to blasphemy [which is not an offense in French law].
“It was all those things and for millions of French people, there was something that profoundly shocked them. And not just French people. I travelled a lot afterwards and people everywhere were shocked.”
A decade on, the attack is still causing tensions in France. Eight people were last month given jail terms of up to 16 years for their role in the beheading in 2020 of a secondary school teacher targeted by Islamists for showing his class the caricatures of Muhammad that had appeared in Charlie Hebdo. In Lille, a screening of a documentary about the magazine, scheduled for January, has been cancelled after cinema managers said they feared public disorder. In Paris, a memorial stone for one of the police officers killed in the January 2015 attack was vandalized late last year, with the words Je suis Gaza painted on it.
Charlie Hebdo created a special edition to coincide with the tenth anniversary of the attacks. It featured drawings by the winners of a competition for cartoonists invited to produce the “funniest and meanest caricature about God”. It also included the results of an opinion poll, which Biard says shows that ordinary French people remain attached to the weekly’s values, even if their political leaders have grown lukewarm in their support.
Above all, however, the publication will be a snub to the terrorists who attacked the magazine a decade ago, he says.
“They ran into the street shouting: ‘We have killed Charlie Hebdo’. They were wrong. Charlie Hebdo continues.”
Adam Sage is the Paris correspondent for The Times of London
