The bouquets have reappeared at number 10 rue Nicolas-Appert in Paris, a few meters from Boulevard Richard Lenoir, in the east of the capital. On the wall, a covered plaque that cannot be seen and that awaits tomorrow’s tribute to the victims in the presence of Macron and Mayor Anne Hidalgo. Charlie’s office is no longer here but the place is still marked by horror. “I remember it as if it were yesterday,” tells us Richard, a resident of the neighborhood who was at home on January 7, 2015, which marked a before and after in the history of France. An attack that was very significant for everything it contained and at the same time, it was only the first in a long list of attacks that spread terror in France during those leaden years of jihadist terrorism whose shock wave has reached today. Ten years later, France is asking itself what remains of the spirit of Charlie Hebdo. On the occasion of the anniversary, and among multiple tributes, the satirical magazine intends to answer this question with a national survey that will appear tomorrow in its special issue ten years later in which, in addition, it will publish several caricatures from an international contest that Charlie Hebdo launched around mid-December. The spirit of laughing at all religions and blasphemy as a social conquest is still alive, but its enemies are no less than in 2015.
“There is a clear weakening of Charlie’s spirit due to the growth of extreme identity movements on both the left and the right,” Pedro García, a sociologist at the University of Nanterre, tells LA RAZON, adding that this process of weakening has gone “parallel” to the process of erosion of Western democracies. In his opinion, today there are many fewer adherents to the slogan “Je suis Charlie”, “some with an intentional political agenda and others out of pure ignorance.”
Coinciding with the anniversary, France not only pays tribute to the twelve fatalities of that attack, eight of them from the editorial staff, but also questions the evolution that secularism and freedoms have had in these ten years to know in what point is found. “Behind the word secularism, which is the same, we have been incorporating content that has evolved over these ten years,” Christophe Bertosi, one of the greatest researchers in Islam and secularism in France, tells LA RAZON.
«In origin, secularism is a principle of citizenship. The 1905 law includes as basic principles: the neutrality of the state and religious freedom, that everyone has the right to believe or not in what they want. But since that attack against Charlie this has changed. Since then, secularism has been understood as a cultural identity principle of France. And minorities and groups are asked to demonstrate their adherence to French values through secularism. “It is a demonstration of the quality of good French,” he adds. In this decade, secularism has become another element of the political battle and has abandoned the consensual terrain it had before that attack. «It is a clear effect, direct or indirect, of the 2015 attacks because we made secularism a primary issue in the response to terrorism. Paradoxically, radicalization processes have little to do with secularism, they have to do with specific individuals and not with society being more or less secular, but we have made this issue something of identity that is required of certain minorities,” he tells us. Faced with attacks from the military establishment or conservative associations, which repeatedly sued Charlie Hebdo in the 1970s for its irreverent tone, it has turned to legal attacks from associations of minority communities, recalls historian Christian Delporte in the pages of the newspaper. Le Monde.
Near Charlie’s old headquarters, already on Richard Lenoir Boulevard, a group of twenty-somethings remember the moment. “There was a debate in class about freedom of expression,” says Claire, a Parisian from a wealthy neighborhood. In his case, he relates “there was consensus in adhering to ‘Je suis Charlie'”, but his friends report cases of discrepancies already at that time. The debate in the classrooms of many French suburbs was heated and a decade later it continues to be the target of recurring political anger from time to time.
Meanwhile, the residents of this eleventh arrondissement of Paris continue to remember perfectly that cold and gray morning in which the brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi left Charlie’s headquarters after having fired indiscriminately, shouting “We have killed Charlie Hebdo!” . Since then, the magazine continues to be published, and its small editorial team of cartoonists and journalists lives under great security measures. The magazine had an extraordinary sales boom after the attack. It sold eight million copies right after the tragedy, and currently it has about 30,000 subscribers and 20,000 sales at newsstands. But since then the publication has had to face other criticism, some of the fiercest from intellectuals and politicians of the radical left who reproach its cartoonists for persisting in their satirical tone, which they consider Islamophobic. A year ago, Charlie Hebdo magazine published cartoons that mocked Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, and days later the magazine’s commercial site was hacked.
«One has every right not to like Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons, its humor, its provocations, the ideas of its journalists. But ‘being Charlie’ ten years ago meant rejecting that men and women die to express their ideas,” explained the magazine’s former security director, Éric Delbecque, in an interview published by the newspaper Le Figaro. Delbecque accuses in his recently published book “Les irresponsables” what he considers the “cowardice” of the State and political leaders in the face of the Islamist threat.
The Charlie Hebdo attacks marked the beginning of a wave of attacks in France. On November 13, 2015, attacks occurred at the Bataclan venue and other bars and restaurants in Paris, leaving 130 dead. And on December 23, a court convicted eight people linked to the beheading of high school teacher Samuel Paty in 2020. Paty had shown Charlie Hebdo’s Muhammad cartoons in his high school class, which sparked a “campaign of hatred” that ended in his murder, according to the court that tried the attack.