On January 7, 8 and 9, 2015, Islamist terrorist attacks killed people at the editorial office of the satirical weekly, at the Porte-de-Vincennes supermarket, or in Montrouge.
There are those birthdays that we wish we would never celebrate. But which concern events of which nothing would be worse than to see them fall into oblivion. This is the case for what is most often called “the attack on Charlie Hebdo”, which already proves to be incomplete, and which validates, in fact, the need to return to it.
What we are commemorating here, and which will be commemorated throughout the country this week, is in fact the terrorist attacks which bloodied Paris and stunned the country between January 7 and 9, 2015. Their results, ten years later, are chilling always the bloods.
Seventeen dead, twenty-two injured
Seventeen dead. Twelve during the assault on the premises of the weekly, in the 11th arrondissement: eleven people present on the scene (a maintenance worker, and ten collaborators or guests of the newspaper), and a police officer who tried to prevent the flight of the perpetrators of the shooting, the brothers Chérif and Saïd Kouachi Kouachi.
A young police officer murdered in Montrouge the next day by Amedy Coulibaly, a friend of the siblings. Four people killed on January 9 in the Hyper Cacher supermarket, Porte-de-Vincennes, in which Amedy Coulibaly, who was targeting Jews, took customers and staff hostage.
The three terrorists killed
The three terrorists will be killed on January 9. The Kouachi, by the GIGN forces, in a printing house in Seine-et-Marne, where they had taken refuge. Coulibaly by the men of the RAID and the BRI during the assault on the Hyper Cacher. 22 people were also injured during these various events.
Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula will claim responsibility for the attack Charlie Hebdoa newspaper reviled for publishing caricatures of Mohammed. Coulibaly will claim, via a video, to have acted on behalf of the Islamic State, which the organization will not confirm.
The litany of horrors
Ten years later, we can only see that these three days marked the end of one world and the beginning of another. For the worst often, notably during this year 2015, punctuated by other horrors, and ended by the tragic night of November 13 in Paris, and the successive attacks carried out at the Stade de France, on the terraces of the 10th and 11th arrondissements, and at the Bataclan.
The litany will continue in 2016, a year mourned by the 86 deaths of the July 14 attack in Nice, by the assassination of the police officer and his partner in Magnanville, or by the death of Father Hamel, whose throat was cut in his church in Saint- Etienne-du-Rouvray.
Then Carcassonne, Trèbes or Strasbourg for the Christmas market, then Samuel Paty in Éragny-sur-Oise, then Dominique Bernard in Arras, the list seems endless.
Attacks aborted, or narrowly avoided
Especially considering that, parallel, of the tragedies aborted or avoided by miracle, of Poitiers, where the town hall was recently targeted before the arrest of those who wanted to take action, in La Grande-Motte, with, this summer, the The explosion of a gas cylinder which set fire to the synagogue half an hour before the Shabbat service began.
And for historical reasons, we would certainly have to go back to the dark days of March 2012, with the killings in Toulouse and Montauban perpetrated by Mohammed Merah, if we wanted to find the founding act of the Islamist attacks perpetrated on French soil, and born in the Al-Qaeda nebula.
Gigantic republican marches
But that said, it all comes back to Charlie, and January 7th. With November 13 and the Bataclan, these dates remain those cataclysms which took everything away, and which still determine today much of what makes up French society in this first quarter of the 21st century, in its divisions and its torments. All over the world, we were Charlie for a few weeks, and gigantic republican marches, never seen since the Liberation, swept across the country on January 10 and 11.
“A tragic signal”
But already, very quickly, nuances were emerging, particularly outside our borders. Without initially attaching much importance to it. In the United States and the United Kingdom, many media reported on the affair by blurring Charlie's drawings where Mohammed was represented. And four years later, the New York Times decided to no longer publish political cartoons.
“Source of too much trouble” as recently confided to the magazine Casemate the press cartoonist Coco (holder of the position at Liberationshe was present at Charlie January 7). “A tragic signal” she lamented.
A subject which will certainly also be at the heart of this week's debates for history and remembrance
