Charlie Hebdo ‘feels alone’ in its fight to poke fun at world

Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical weekly propelled to global notoriety when its cartoonists were shot dead by jihadist gunmen a year ago on Thursday, has been abandoned in its struggle to “laugh at everything”, one of the survivors of the attack said.

In the wake of the killing of eight of its staff on January 7, 2015, Charlie Hebdo became one of the best-known publications in the world and the hashtag #JeSuisCharlie flashed across social networks.

The newspaper was held up as a symbol of freedom of expression and an astonishing 7.5 million copies were sold of the first issue produced by its surviving staff just a week after the attack.

But now those same staff feel they have been left to carry that torch alone, according to the newspaper’s financial director, Eric Portheault, who escaped death by hiding behind his desk when the gunmen stormed in.

“We feel terribly alone. We hoped that others would do satire too,” he said. “No one wants to join us in this fight because it’s dangerous. You can die doing it.” 

A month before the attack, Charlie Hebdo was close to shutting down as sales had dipped below 30,000. Its brand of provocative, no-holds-barred humour appeared to have gone out of fashion. Most people were unaware that its staff had been under police protection since it had published cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in 2006. In 2011, its offices were firebombed and it was forced to move premises. Despite the earlier threats, few people could have imagined an attack as bloody as that carried out by brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi in the paper’s modest offices in a quiet street in eastern Paris.