Death to satire

IT WAS the sort of attack that the French government has dreaded for several months. Only in December Manuel Valls, the prime minister, declared gravely that France had “never faced a greater terrorist threat”. On January 7th armed gunmen burst into the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo, a newspaper known for its defiant publication of satirical cartoons, and shot dead ten people. Two police officers were also killed. President François Hollande, who arrived swiftly at the scene, was in no doubt: it was “a terrorist attack” of “extreme barbarity”. It was also the worst act of terrorism to be perpetrated on French soil for over 50 years.

The choice of target was not random. Charlie Hebdo has prided itself over the years for putting free speech above political correctness, mocking politics as well as religion, and Catholicism as well as Islam. In 2006 it reprinted provocative cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that had provoked consternation and terrorist threats when they were first published by a Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten. (The Economist chose not to publish them.) Five years later, Charlie Hebdo published an entire edition that it entitled Charia Hebdo, which it advertised as having been “edited” by the Prophet. During the night just before publication, its Paris offices were firebombed.