A rude, obscene, irreverent member of our family

The national satirical magazine offered a space of complete and glorious freedom, writes Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

IN France we thought that we had become inured to terrorism in the past half century — that hinterland to the Algerian War. There were attacks in the ’70s and ’80s: Carlos the Jackal targeted the Drugstore Saint-Germain in 1974 and the Jewish restaurant Goldenberg in 1982. There were Iranian-sponsored bombings on Rue Marbeuf in 1983 and the Tati discount shop on Rue de Rennes in 1986. I still remember the blood on the platform of the Saint-Michel express Metro station in 1995 from Khaled Kelkal’s nail bombs.

We learnt so much over the years that French investigating judges for terrorist affairs have been advising the FBI since the September 11 2001 attacks.

But this week’s strikes in Paris are not just about how many people died: Charlie Hebdo is family to us.

We all grew up with the work of the slain cartoonists Cabu and Wolinski. Every French person under the age of 70 at some stage of their life read Pilote, the imaginative, groundbreaking magazine where they started their careers.

In the 1968 student revolt, when Pilote felt too childish and safe, some of its cartoonists moved to Hara-Kiri Hebdo, which became Charlie Hebdo after an irreverent cover on former president General de Gaulle’s death in 1970 got the weekly banned.

The following week, the mag- azine returned, identical except for its title. (“Charlie”, from Charles de Gaulle, was a poke at the ban.)

Charlie was — and is — rude, obscene, irreverent, and antireligious. Its hallmark is witty bad taste. It has depicted the pope being sodomised by priests, nuns kissing decades before gay marriage was even suggested and French politi- cians in ridiculous poses as a matter of course. One 2006 cartoon had politician Ségolène Royal and her then partner, François Hollande — now the president — as Adam and Eve gambolling naked in the Garden of Eden; she was the one with the testicles.

Nevertheless, when the Great Mosque of Paris and the Union of French Islamic Organisations took Charlie to court for insulting their religion by publishing the Danish Mohammed cartoons in 2006, all three presidential candidates — Nicolas Sarkozy, Royal and the centrist François Bayrou — were in court to give testimony in support of the magazine.

In a country where the press runs the gamut from timid to downright craven, our two na- tional satirical magazines (Charlie and the older Canard Enchaîné, founded by pacifists in 1917) are areas of complete, glorious freedom.

A killing rampage at Charlie Hebdo hits at perhaps the truest expression of free speech in France: the magazine speaks with bitter humour, sarcasm, nihilism. The toxic accusation of Islamophobia — a loaded word that lets its wielders choose the terrain where they want to corner you, barring you from criticising an idea — didn’t stick to them, legally or otherwise, although there were countless attempts to make it do so.

The leader of the right-wing National Front political party, Marine Le Pen will try, of course, to use the killings for her own aims, but I don’t think she will succeed. With a bit of luck, the rest of our sorry political class, on both sides of the ideological spectrum, will seize the opportunity to unite over this. It would be a fitting legacy for the Charlie Hebdo dead. — ©