The magazine is publishing a special issue ten years after the attack

Exactly 10 years after a jihadist gun attack killed most of its editorial staff, France’s Charlie Hebdo has released a special edition to show its cause is still going strong.

Everything changed for France on January 7, 2015, the bloodshed ending all willful naivete about the threat of militant Islamism.

Said brothers and Sheriff Kouachi broke into a meeting at the Paris office of a satirical weekly, killing its star cartoonists Cabu, Volinsky, Charb and Tina.

In total, the brothers killed 12 people, including a Muslim policeman who was on duty in the street. Two days later, they were cornered and shot dead by police at a sign-making factory near Charles de Gaulle airport.

That same day, Amédi Coulibaly – a one-time prison associate of Sheriff – killed four Jews in a simultaneous hostage-taking at a supermarket in eastern Paris. Coulibaly, who was shot by the police, killed a policewoman the day before.

Ten years later, Charlie Hebdo continues to publish a weekly edition and has a circulation (print and online combined) of around 50,000 copies.

He does this from an office whose location is kept secret and with a staff of bodyguards.

But in an editorial in Tuesday’s commemorative edition, the paper’s major shareholder said the spirit of gross anti-religious irreverence was still alive.

“The desire to laugh will never go away,” said Laurent Sarisseau, also known as Rhys, a cartoonist who survived the Jan. 7 attack with a bullet to his shoulder.

“There is one virtue in satire that has carried us through these tragic years – optimism. If people want to laugh, it’s because they want to live.

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

Also, the 32-page special issue presents 40 winning works in the cartoon competition on the theme “Laugh at God”.

One features an image of a cartoonist asking himself, “Can you draw a man who draws a man who draws Muhammad?”

Charlie Hebdo and Hypercacher attacks are emerging now as a prelude to a dark and deadly period in modern France, during which – for a time – the fear of jihadist terrorism has become part of everyday life.

In November 2015, there were armed attacks on the Bataclan theater and nearby bars in Paris. In July of the following year, 86 people died on the promenade in Nice.

About 300 French people have died in Islamist attacks over the past decade.

Today, the frequency has fallen sharply, and the defeat of The Islamic State group means that there is no longer a support base in the Middle East.

But the self-radicalized killer via the Internet remains a constant threat in France, as elsewhere.

The original pretext for the Charlie Hebdo killings – cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad – is now strictly banned for publication worldwide.

In 2020, a French teacher Samuel Pati was beheaded outside his school by a jihadist after he showed one of Charlie’s cartoons during a free speech debate.

And this week, the trial begins in Paris of a Pakistani man who, shortly before Patty’s murder, seriously injured two people with a butcher’s cleaver in the Paris offices he believed were still used by Charlie Hebdo (in fact, they had long since moved). .

So, as with every anniversary since 2015, the question is again being asked in France: what has changed – when has anything changed? And what – if anything – survived of the great influence of international support, whose rallying cry in the days after the murders was Je suis Charlie?

Then, at the invitation of the then president Francois Hollande, heads of state and government from all over the world joined the two-million-strong march through the center of Paris.

Today, pessimists say the battle is over and lost. The likelihood that a humor paper will ever take up a truncheon against Islam – as Charlie Hebdo regularly and crudely did against Christianity and Judaism – is zero.

To make matters worse for these people, parts of the political left in France are now clearly distancing themselves from Charlie Hebdo, accusing it of becoming overly anti-Islamic and adopting far-right positions.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who heads the France Unbowed party, accused the weekly of being a “peddler of (the right-wing magazine) Valeurs Actuels”, while Greens spokeswoman Sandrine Rousseau said Charlie Hebdo was “misogynistic and sometimes racist”. “.

This in turn led to accusations against the far left that they had betrayed the spirit of free speech of Je suis Charlie in order to win electoral support among French Muslims.

But on the eve of the anniversary, Rees, who counted the dead among his greatest friends and says he never relives the moment of the attack, gave up hope.

“I think (Charlie’s spirit) is more embedded in the community than you might think. When you talk to people, you see that he is very much alive. It is a mistake to think that everything is gone.

“It’s part of our collective memory.”