The French President, Emmanuel Macron, and the Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, will pay tribute, this Tuesday, January 7, to the victims of the Islamist-inspired attacks on Charlie Hebdo and Hypercacher, which had pushed France into crisis. horror ten years ago.
On the morning of January 7, 2015, Chérif and Saïd Kouachi burst into the offices of Charlie Hebdo, killing 12 people in cold blood, including eight members of the editorial staff, then a police officer, Ahmed Merabet, during their escape.
The two brothers, who had pledged allegiance to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, intended to “avenge the Prophet”, whose satirical newspaper had published caricatures in 2006 which had been deemed offensive in the Arab-Muslim world. Five designers – Cabu, Charb, Honoré, Tignous and Wolinski – are among the victims.
Chérif and Saïd Kouachi were shot dead two days later by the police while they had taken refuge in a printing works in Dammartin-en-Goële (Seine-et-Marne).
The same day, four Jewish customers of a hypercasher store located at Porte de Vincennes, in the east of the capital, were murdered by Amedy Coulibaly, a jihadist claiming to be from the Islamic State (IS) organization who had already killed a municipal police officer the day before in Montrouge (Hauts-de-Seine), south of Paris.
These attacks, the starting point of a wave of jihadist-inspired attacks which bloodied France for several years, inspired the slogan “Je suis Charlie” and sparked a gigantic mobilization in favor of freedom of expression on 11 January 2015 in the streets of Paris, where dozens of heads of state and government paraded.
“In the world when France is affected, it is freedom, human rights which are attacked while unfortunately, terrorism has spread everywhere,” said former President François Hollande during a interview with Reuters. “It is towards France that we turn because it is France, this strong idea of freedom which prevails over all other considerations.”
Freedom of expression
Ten years after the events, and a painful trial of the assassins’ accomplices which did not provide all the answers hoped for, Charlie Hebdo “is still there”, proclaims its editorial director, Riss, in an anniversary issue entitled “Incredible! “, with on the front page, a hilarious reader sitting on a Kalashnikov, the weapon of the Kouachi brothers.
“Satire has a virtue that has helped us get through these tragic years: optimism,” Riss writes in his editorial. “If we want to laugh, it’s because we want to live. Laughter, irony, caricature are manifestations of optimism. Whatever happens, dramatic or happy, the The urge to laugh will never go away.”
For François Hollande, freedom of expression remains a precious asset to be preserved in the age of social networks.
“It is threatened, sometimes hampered by a form of fear that has taken hold. Should we publish drawings, project certain images, make reports when we know that they can hurt personalities or communities? There is this form of self-censorship that has taken hold,” he notes.
In his eyes, the “libertarian conception” notably advocated by billionaire Elon Musk, owner of the social network
“Freedom of expression – and this was the case with the Charlie Hebdo caricatures – can be mocked, denounced, but it is never a call to hatred, discrimination or the questioning of the faithful or of practitioners of a religion, while absolute freedom allows you to say everything about everything without limits”, judges the former president who has become a deputy again.
“We are still here, 10 years after years,” confides the editor-in-chief of the Charlie Hebdo newspaper
With our colleagues at RMC, Gérard Biard, editor-in-chief of the satirical newspaper, returns to the terrible attack which affected the editorial staff of Charlie Hebdo. He confides: “This symbolic date is complicated every year. This year it is even more so, there is the symbol of the date.”
He adds: “We are still here, 10 years later. The two terrorists who came out of the premises shouting ‘we killed Charlie Hebdo’, we made them lie. Charlie Hebdo is still there. We exercise our freedoms.”
“Freedom of expression is a fundamental right”, assures National Secretary of the PCF
“Tomorrow evening, at the PCF headquarters, we will present the drawings which came from the competition which was launched by Charlie Hebdo, “laughter of god”, and which were produced by cartoonists from all over the world. They made caricatures of one or more religions,” he explains.
How has French opinion evolved regarding freedom of expression in satire and press cartoons?
According to an Ifop survey published by the newspaper Charlie Hebdo, for 76% of French people, freedom of expression is a fundamental right. In addition, 62% of French people consider that it is possible to criticize a religious belief, symbol or dogma in an outrageous manner.
However, according to this survey, a third of young people under 35 think that we cannot say and caricature everything we want under the guise of freedom of expression, compared to 21% of 35-64 year olds. .
