This is the fourth anniversary of the terrorist attack against the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.
Four years on, the survivors who still produce the weekly paint an embittered picture of a French society which appears to have turned its back on the Enlightenment values of rationality, debate and the acceptance of differences.
“A lot of people have already given up,” says Riss, the caricaturist and current editor of Charlie, himself shot in the shoulder during the attack. His complaint is not simply that the personal tragedies have been forgotten. Riss feels that France has turned its back on what happened, that the enemy is not just religious extremism but a large part of the French intelligensia.
In the editorial of last Saturday’s commemorative edition, Riss laments the fact that the situation concerning what he calls “islamic totalitarianism” has gotten worse. “Blasphemy has had babies,” he says “Everything is now blasphemous.”
.... The paper continues to sell 30,000 copies every week, and has thirty thousand subscribers, but is being ruined by the security bill, currently running at one million euros per year, entirely at the publication’s expense.
The most recently published company accounts show a loss for the year 2017.
Riss remains hopeful. His wish for 2019 is that the paper will continue to make readers think, give them hope, make them feisty. “We can’t bow to doom and depression,” he says, “even if things remain very worrying.” [Yahoo News] Read more
