On Your Knees!

"We publish caricatures every week, but people only describe them as declarations of war when it's about the person of the prophet or radical Islam."
"When you start saying that you can't create such drawings, then the same thing will soon apply to other, more harmless representations."
"I have no kids, no wife, no car, no credit. It may be a little pompous what I'm going to say, but I'd rather die standing up than live on my knees."
Stephane Charbonnier, late editor-in-chief, Charlie Hebdo

Vigil: People gathered around candles and pens at the Place de la Republique in Paris in support of the victims after the terrorist attack

"They were not evil people. They were just people who wanted us to be happy. They were people who wanted humour to have its place in our lives. That is all, and that is what was murdered. Perhaps the media were sub-par during all these years on this radicalization. This rise of fundamentalism in France was not talked about enough. The alarm was not sounded enough. We did what we could, and we were often alone."

Philippe Val, past editor, Charlie Hebdo

The French satirical magazine saw nothing as sacred, nothing escaped the scathing images of politicians, religious figures, celebrities; everything and everyone could and would be critiqued. There was nothing that could be set aside and held beyond comment meant to illustrate the absurdity of the human condition, our fascination with and for ourselves, our liabilities as decent human beings, our fallibility as thinkers and doers; sacrilege an unrecognized concept to those who insisted on an obligation to laugh at our stupidities.

How else recognize how given we are as a species to glorifying ourselves even while we are so busy wallowing in the garbage we create, covering ourselves in the manure of our own making, delighting in believing the fantasies of ourselves as good and decent and caring and kind even when we are not? "Nothing is sacred. Principle No.1. Not even your own mother, not the Jewish martyrs, not even people starving of hunger", urged the magazine's founder, Francois Cavanna.

"Laugh at everything, ferociously, bitterly, to exorcise the old monsters." Jews, in fact, are known for their black humour, a bitter nasty humour that is meant to address the misfortunes of life born of the disease of anti-Semitism that plagued and continues to hound that small but persistent and enduring community sharing an ethnic culture and religious belief, along with a tragic history and an unknowable future.

Lawsuits brought against Charlie Hebdo didn't seem to faze those who worked for the idea behind the magazine. Mostly atheists living within an officially secular country whose values were those of tolerance and brotherhood. A country which in a spirit of tolerance absorbed within its geography refugees and immigrants from countries whose tribal cultural inheritance and religious intolerance would change the underground face of the country in ways hardly imagined.

Refusing to be suppressed either by outraged establishment figures or by existential threats to murder, to firebomb their premises, the magazine and its journalists and cartoonists became accustomed to living under police protection. And they died under that same protection. Illustrating that if evil is sufficiently intent, it will have its way. And in having its way, this becomes a day of infamy.