The Caricatures
When La Caricature, that had published the “pear” in 1835, was condemned, they were ordered to publish the judgment on their front page; they complied, putting the words together so to make the unmistakable shape of... a pear. Charlie Hebdo also refused to yield to the pressures of the extremists of Islam after they received some threats for publishing the caricatures of Muhammad for the first time, some ten years ago—but who was CH talking to exactly? It was born out of Hara-Kiri, a satirical magazine published in the 1960s, when the social pressure was almost unbearable until it exploded during the spring of 1968. A wind of freedom was blowing all over France; free speech, free thinking, and free sex. To draw a naked woman in a magazine was a sort of jubilation for most of the people who had experienced the dark previous decade. CH was a far-left newspaper but it mainly consisted of a bunch of clowns, who enjoyed themselves. Yet, in 2015, printing around 50,000 copies a week, they belonged to the past—the chief editor, who was the primary target of the raid, was in his forties; but Cabu, one of the victims, was over 80; and the cartoonist Wolinski, 76—not the prime youth of the French rebellious avant-garde. Before the terrorists turned them into martyrs, they were poor heirs to Voltaire, in the sense that sometimes appeared to preach another religion, atheism... Worse, they sometimes bordered on nihilism. And this was clearly not the message of Voltaire. “I made mistakes sometimes,” he wrote about God. “But my heart was always full of You.”
