Charlie Hebdo will survive

Among the 12 journalists who died in the January 7 attack on the Charlie Hebdo magazine office was an old friend of mine, Georges Wolinski, 80. We had lunch just before Christmas. This was clearly an extremely well planned attack—the gunmen knew the precise time and day on which the weekly editorial meeting was held. They wanted to make sure they caused the maximum havoc. This will be a day that France will remember for a long time, but tragically not for the right reasons.

Charlie Hebdo, was founded in 1970, and is famous for its satirical political cartoons. It attracted the attention of Islam extremists in February 2006 when it reprinted 12 cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad that were originally published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. Then in 2011, the Charlie Hebdo office was destroyed by a petrol bomb, a day after it named the Prophet Muhammad as the "guest editor” for its next issue. The editor Stephane Charbonnier, known as Charb, said at the time in a BBC interview that the incident was an attack against freedom itself by "idiot extremists" not representative of France's Muslim population. Despite receiving death threats and being on al Qaeda’s most wanted list, Charb was determined to keep publishing. He was reportedly the first to be hit.

France is a secular nation. We intend to stay that way. Satirical publications such as Charlie Hebdo succeed because they take away the power of these extremists groups through humour. Their message is that we are free to satirise, criticise, and reject any belief systems we disagree with. The French Muslim Council [which sued Charlie Hebdo in 2006 for publishing cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad], has vigorously condemned the terrorist attack, as have a few of the country’s other Muslim leaders.

Despite the country’s key political figures such as President Hollande and former President Sarkozy calling for a moment of national unity, this incident is still likely to fuel the anti-immigration stance of Marine Le Pen’s Front National. Before this tragedy happened, attitudes to Islam were already in the spotlight due to the controversy around Michel Houellebecq's new novel, Soumission, which is featured in the current issue of Charlie Hebdo and has been criticised for its ambiguity towards extremist Islam. The book is set in France in 2022, where a Muslim president is elected and proceeds to Islamise the European Union. All French citizens have to convert to what is termed in the book as “moderate Islam”. Its publication had been cleverly orchestrated by its publisher—to court publicity before it appeared in book shops. But, these tragic events now create a perverse background to the whole story. 

In France freedom of the press is a basic right. Political cartooning is an old journalistic tradition, which might hurt those who are the target of it but that is what freedom of expession is all about. Charlie Hebdo is known for its left wing, anti-religious, irreverent stance. People who buy it [its circulation is around 60, 000] expect it to hit out at the extreme right, the Catholic church, the Jews and any other fundamentalist factions. The staff of Charlie Hebdo see it as their role to criticise and ironise all sorts of institutions, starting with politicians. That is their trade.

The only possible positive to draw from this is that there thousands of people who have expressed their support on Twitter for Charlie Hebdo under the hashtag #jesuischarlie. Hopefully this will translate into financial support. Traditionally it has been seen as an extremely left wing, fringe publication, but today the whole French media is united in our support for this magazine. The surviving staff members remain defiant, vowing to publish 1m copies of the satirical magazine next week. As journalists it is our duty to ensure Charlie Hebdo survives.

Interview by Serena Kutchinsky