The French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo marked the 10th anniversary of a deadly terror attack on its office with a special edition featuring a cartoon contest inviting entrants to lampoon God.
Editors called on cartoonists to submit their “funniest and meanest” depictions of God, in a “bid to show they had lost none of their provocative defiance” since Islamist attackers shot dead eight of the magazine’s employees, as well as a visiting guest, a maintenance worker and two police officers, said The Telegraph.
‘Tempering satire’
In the immediate aftermath of the attack, the slogan “Je suis Charlie” (I am Charlie) became a catchphrase to express solidarity with the publication and support for free speech, but that support has steadily fallen, said The Economist. In a survey carried out in France last year, only 58% of those polled agreed with the statement “Je suis Charlie”, down from 71% in 2016.
Over the last decade, there’s been a “remarkable shift” away from “unequivocal denunciation of the Charlie murders”, said Andrew Hussey in Unherd. By 2020, a poll found that 31% of the French population thought that Charlie Hebdo had brought the attacks on themselves through a “useless provocation”.
This “may reflect a more general trend” in the West of “growing intolerance for causing offence“, said The Economist. “Self-censorship”, rather than the law, now “tempers satire”. “The killers have won”, said Brendan O’Neill in The Spectator. Where they saw “blasphemy”, we see “Islamophobia“, and “where they believed such unholy utterances should be punished by summary execution”, we “prefer to punish them with bans or fines or social ostracism”.
The ambivalence towards the Charlie Hebdo massacre represents a “fundamental change” in how “erstwhile progressives understand their society”, said Hussey. The far-Left has “broadly drifted away from outright support for Charlie’s right to blaspheme” and French liberals “aren’t much better”. Laurent Sourisseau, the magazine’s director and a survivor of the attack, said that the French left has “beaten all the records of cowardice and denial”.
‘Laughter and courage’
Charlie Hebdo now operates from a secure and secret location, and its editor lives under police protection. Yet “it’s still courting controversy”, said Sky News, with content that it considers “light-hearted impudence”, but which others will maintain are “profoundly offensive”.
It is “impossible to ignore” how “fleeting” the “Je suis Charlie” moment proved to be, said Freddie Attenborough in The Critic. But free speech should not be a “privilege to be granted or withdrawn based on whose feelings are hurt” because “it is a cornerstone of democracy” and “indispensable for questioning power, dogma and orthodoxy”.
Charlie Hebdo has become “a symbol” of “freedom of speech in the face of Islamist barbarism”, of “laughter in the face of terror”, and of “courage”, said Tom Slater in Spiked. So on this “awful anniversary”, let’s all “speak more freely – and fearlessly – than ever before”, because a decade on, Charlie Hebdo “lives”, and “so long as we all stand up for freedom of speech, no one can kill it”.