This morning in Paris, three gunmen opened fire on the editorial staff of Charlie Hebdo, a weekly french satirical newspaper. Ten people in the staff were killed as well as two police officers. Several were left gravely injured and are fighting for their lives at this very moment.
It’s really hard to communicate the magnitude of this event to someone who didn’t grow up in France. Of course, there’s the violence and the brutality with which the victims were executed. You don’t wake up in the morning thinking about the possibility of facing such a death but I guess that’s the world we live in. I’ll forever remember the place and the time when I learned about this.
The victims were people, with families and relatives that are mourning them. They were journalists and cops, both doing their jobs on the frontline. But moreover, the target of the attack was Charlie Hebdo – “Charlie”. The perpetrators were heard leaving the scene screaming in joy “On a tué Charlie!”, “We killed Charlie!”. All these cartoonists and journalists were celebrities and they were partners in a newspaper that had an iconic status in France. They were people I knew, people I had read, people I had laughed with. I read Charlie every week through high school and college. It shaped my political conscience, as was the case for so many young adults from the ’70s and until today. They were family – they had been working together for decades.
I’ve left France almost a decade ago and I don’t think I’ve seen any equivalent to the way Charlie was handling the news. Leftist, anti-cleric, pacifist, humorous, punchy, radical, scruffy. Fighting against all established powers, religious and politic alike. Charlie lived and thrived like an old-school newspaper. It was one of the last two fully independent national newspapers in France: they relied solely on subscription revenue.
The absence of paid ads gave them full liberty to address all that’s fit to print and also some of what’s not fit to print. They excelled in using and playing with the age-old concept of ‘freedom of speech’. It was not just a concept to them - their liberty was a way of life. Charlie had already been targeted three years ago and Charb (Stéphane Charbonnier, editor in chief and one of today’s victim) was under permanent police escort.
Charlie didn’t have an editorial policy, didn’t have a style guide. They didn’t care about digital, didn’t care about social media. They were living week-by-week, pulling a new issue and moving on. Some people were prompt to denounce Charlie Hebdo as a racist publication. I suppose anything is up for debate but I don’t think that’s the case. When you get killed by an extremist for doing nothing but your job, you must have been doing something right.
I don’t know what’s going to happen next – the loss seems like too much to stomach for everyone. But we’re going to have to live through this. To those who don’t: may you rest in peace.