Undaunted, Charlie still stirring pot

Paris marks anniversary of massacre A YEAR on from the Charlie Hebdo attack, the satirical magazine’s circulation has risen tenfold, but surviving staff are haunted by trauma, plagued by death threats and divided by internal squabbles. A million copies of a special issue will be printed this week to mark the anniversary of the attack by Islamist gunmen who slaughtered 12 people at the magazine and five others. It features cartoons by some of those killed, new material by current staff and messages of support for the provocative left-wing weekly with a long history of mocking religions, especially Islam. The weekly that used to scrape by with sales of fewer than 30 000 now has more than 180 000 subscribers and distributes a further 100 000 copies to news agents, in addition to 10 000 sold outside France. But the inflow of money has caused internal squabbles. Some staff have demanded that all employees be made equal shareholders. It spends massively on security and recently moved to a new, heavily guarded office at a secret address. Some staff members have found it difficult to adapt to a life with police escorts and bodyguards. “We’ve had death threats for years and we thought they would stop [after the attack], but they haven’t. If anything, they’ve increased,” Patrick Pelloux said. He is a Charlie Hebdo columnist and a casualty doctor who treated victims of the November 13 massacre in Paris in which 130 people died. “We are at war with Islamist Nazis, because Nazis are what they are,” Pelloux said. “If they had their way they’d censor all sorts of things; they would probably ban Mr Bean.”

Charlie Hebdo first attracted international attention by republishing a Danish newspaper’s incendiary cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in 2006. Since the attack, the French magazine has continued to cause outrage with its irreverent, often sexually explicit cartoons, sometimes bordering on bad taste. It received about 20 death threats for a front-page cartoon in September depicting Aylan Kurdi, the Syrian child found dead on a Turkish beach whose picture prompted an outpouring of sympathy for the refugees. Charlie Hebdo showed the toddler’s body beside a billboard advertising McDonald’s children’s menus, with the caption, “So close to the goal”. The magazine makes few, if any, concessions to political correctness. “Self-censorship is creeping in, but in France we are accustomed to black humour even if some people misunderstood the point of these cartoons,” Pelloux said. “We were not mocking Aylan Kurdi . . . we were making a point about hypocrisy. “This is the same culture we had in the time of Voltaire, it goes back to the tradition of court jesters, the fools who spoke the truth to the king. Any censorship is appalling. We can’t let radical Islamists who are trying to bring terror to the whole world set the editorial agenda.” The attacks on Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish supermarket will be commemorated this week. Heavy security is planned for the ceremonies honouring the victims of the January 7 to 9 attacks, which proved to be a grim forerunner of the November Paris suicide attacks. The special edition will have a cover cartoon showing an angry God with blood on his hands and a Kalashnikov automatic rifle strapped to his back. “One year later, the assassin is still on the run,” the headline says. Today, President Francois Hollande is due to attend low-key ceremonies unveiling commemorative plaques at the main sites.