Exactly 10 years after the jihadist gun attack that killed most of its editorial staff, France's Charlie Hebdo has released a special issue to show its cause continues to work.
Things changed for France on January 7, 2015, marking in bloodshed the end of any willful naivete about the threat of militant Islamism.
Said brothers and Sherif Kouachi stormed a meeting at the Paris office of the satirical weekly, killing its star cartoonists Cabeau, Wolinsky, Charb and Tinu.
A total of 12 people were killed by the brothers, including a Muslim policeman who was on duty outside. Two days later, they were cornered and shot dead by police at a sign-making company near Charles de Gaulle airport.
On the same day, Amédi Coulibaly – a one-time associate of the Sheriff in prison – killed four Jews in a synchronized hostage-taking at a supermarket in eastern Paris. Coulibaly – who was then shot dead by police – had killed a policewoman the previous day.
A decade later, Charlie Hebdo continues to publish a weekly edition and has a circulation (combined print and online) of around 50,000.
He does it from an office whose location is kept secret and with a staff that is protected by bodyguards.
But in an editorial in Tuesday's commemorative edition, the paper's major shareholder said the spirit of gross anti-religious disrespect was still very much alive.
“The desire to laugh will never go away,” said Laurent Sorriso – also known as Rhys – a cartoonist who survived the Jan. 7 attack with a bullet in the shoulder.
“Satire has one virtue that has carried us through these tragic years – optimism. If people want to laugh, it's because they want to live.
“Laughter, irony, and caricature are expressions of optimism,” he wrote.
Also in the 32-page special edition are the 40 winning entries in a “Laughing at God” cartoon contest.
One features the image of a cartoonist asking himself, “Is it okay to draw a person drawing a picture of a person drawing a picture of Muhammad?”
Charlie Hebdo and Hypercacher attacks now appear as a prelude to a dark and deadly period in modern France, during which – for a time – the fear of jihadist terrorism became part of everyday life.
In November 2015 shootings followed at the Bataclan theater and nearby bars in Paris. The following July, 86 people were killed on the promenade in Nice.
About 300 French people have died in Islamist attacks in the past decade.
Today, the frequency has decreased sharply and the defeat of Islamic State group means it no longer has a foothold in the Middle East.
But the self-radicalized killer on the Internet remains a constant threat in France, as elsewhere.
The original pretext for the Charlie Hebdo killings – cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad – are now strictly banned from publication anywhere.
In 2020 a French teacher Samuel Patty was beheaded outside his school by a jihadist after showing one of Charlie's cartoons in a discussion about freedom of speech.
And this week begins the trial in Paris of a Pakistani man who – shortly before Patty's murder – seriously injured two people with a butcher's cleaver in the Paris offices he thought were still being used by Charlie-Hebdo (in fact they had long since moved).
So, as with every anniversary since 2015. since then, the question being asked again in France is: what – if anything – has changed? And what – if anything – remains of the great outpouring of international support whose rallying cry in the days after the killings was Je suis Charlie?
Then the procession of two million people through the center of Paris was joined by heads of state and government from countries around the world at the invitation of the then president Francois Hollande.
Today, pessimists say the battle is over and lost. The chances of any humor newspaper ever taking up the cudgel against Islam—the way Charlie Hebdo regularly and crudely wields it against Christianity and Judaism—are nil.
Worse for these people, parts of the political left in France are already clearly distancing themselves from Charlie Hebdo, accusing it of becoming too anti-Islamic and adopting far-right positions.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who leads the France Unbowed party, accused the weekly of being “a distributor of (the right-wing magazine) Valeurs Actuels”, and Sandrine Rousseau of the Greens said Charlie Hebdo was “misogynistic and at times racist”.
This in turn led to accusations aimed at the far left that it had betrayed the free speech spirit of Je suis Charlie in order to win electoral support among French Muslims.
But speaking on the eve of the anniversary, Rhys – who counts the dead among his closest friends and says not a day goes by without reliving the moment of the attack – refused to give up hope.
“I think (Charlie's spirit) is anchored more deeply in society than one might imagine. When you talk to people, you can see that he is very much alive. It is a mistake to think that all is gone.
“It's part of our collective memory.