By South China Morning Post | Created at 2025-01-06 10:21:34 | Updated at 2025-01-07 20:46:48
1 day ago
French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo unveiled a special edition on Monday to mark 10 years since an attack on its offices by Islamist gunmen that decimated its staff.
The front-page features a cartoon celebrating the atheist paper’s existence with the caption “Indestructible!”, while four inside pages show the results of a caricature contest to mock God and religious leaders.
“Satire has a virtue that has enabled us to get through these tragic years: optimism,” said an editorial from director Riss, who survived the January 7, 2015, massacre that left 12 people, including eight editorial staff, dead.
“If you want to laugh, it means you want to live. Laughing, irony, and caricatures are manifestations of optimism. Whatever happens, dramatic or happy, the desire to laugh will never cease.”
The 2015 attack by two Paris-born brothers of Algerian descent was said to be revenge for Charlie Hebdo’s decision to publish caricatures lampooning the Prophet Mohammed, Islam’s most revered figure.
The massacre of some of France’s most famous cartoonists signalled the start of a gruesome series of al-Qaeda and Islamic State plots that claimed hundreds of lives in France and western Europe over the following years.
