Free Open Letter: On Blasphemy, Islamophobia, and the True Enemies of Free Expression by Charb

Foreword
    by Adam Gopnik
    I read Charlie Hebdo for the first time on early sojourns in France, in the 1970s. I am probably a bit of a coward when it comes to comedy—I probably like it sweeter than I should—but I am at least an instinctive pluralist: I really like there to be things in the world, and on the newsstand, that I don’t like. Charlie Hebdo was not to my taste, but on subsequent, much longer sojourns in France I was always glad to see it persisting; it spoke of an older, rawer French tradition that I could appreciate even if I didn’t much care for it. Crude, scabrous, explicit, sacrilegious—its cartooning lacked the charm of the bande dessinée. But France is an uptight country that needs the relaxation of the truly, weirdly unfastened—Rabelais could only be French, exactly because the refined needs the raw.
    As time passed, I went on to graduate school, and the history of caricature and cartooning became my academic specialty. And so I began to have a greater appreciation of the ancient roots and impious nobility of the magazine. The Charlie cartoonists worked, I realized, in a peculiarly French and savage tradition, born in a long nineteenth-century guerrilla war between republicans and the Church and the monarchy, which had long ago become vestigial everywhere else. Satirical magazines and “name” cartoonists might survive in London and other European capitals, particularly Brussels, but they tend to be artier in touch and more media-centric in concern. Charlie Hebdo was a satirical journal of a kind found almost solely in France. In those years, I would go to the flea markets to find and buy old copies of the great caricature magazines of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries— Le Rire and La Petite Assiette —and realized that Charlie Hebdo was the last flower, or gasp, of this great tradition. Not at all “meta” or “ironic,” like The Onion, nor a place for political gossip, like the Parisian weekly Le Canard Enchaîné or London’s Private Eye, it kept alive this French nineteenth-century tradition of direct, high-spirited, and extremely offensive caricature, the very tradition begun by now legendary caricaturist Honoré Daumier, or his editor Charles Philipon, who was put on trial in 1831 for drawing the head of King Louis-Philippe as a pear.
    Philipon’s famous faux-naïf demonstration of the process of caricature still brings home the almost primitive kind of image-magic that clings to the act of cartooning. At what point was he guilty? Philipon demanded to know, since the King’s head was pear-shaped. How could merely simplifying it to its outline be viewed as an attack on the King? The even coarser and more scabrous cartoons that marked the covers of Charlie Hebdo —and which took in Jesus and Moses, along with Mohammed; angry rabbis and ranting bishops, along with imams—were the last, well, fruit of that tradition. This, for a doubtless too pedantic eye, was one of the things that made Charlie matter; distinguishing French culture from our own modernized one.
    The Charlie cartoonists were, always, radically democratic and egalitarian in their views, with their one passionate dislike being, simply, the hypocrisies of organized religion.  No group has ever been more “ minoritaire ”—more marginalized or on the outs with the political establishment, more vitriolic in its mockery of power, more courageous in opposing people of far greater influence and power than a band of guerrilla cartoonists could ever claim to be. Like their great predecessors, they were always punching up at idols and authorities—and no one in France was more relentlessly, courageously contemptuous of the right-wing Le Pens, père et fille . In the many years I spent in France, the bracing pleasure of seeing some bit of pious nonsense—from the left sometimes, though more often from the far right—blown apart in an image was the chief pleasure of reading Charlie Hebdo.
      
    That