the history of Charlie Hebdo is worth noting. It grew out of a left-wing magazine, Hara Kiri, later Hebdo Hara Kiri (where Hebdo is simply short for hebdomadaire—weekly), which was formed in 1960 to address national political issues and subsequently banned on a number of occasions. When it was banned in 1970 over a mocking headline about Charles de Gaulle’s death its editors reopened it under a different name to avoid the ban, calling it Charlie Hebdo to distinguish it from a monthly magazine, Charlie, that some of the same cartoonists were already running. Charlie was Charlie Brown, but also now, comically, Charles de Gaulle. Its focus was on French politics and when it was felt to have overstepped the mark the democratically elected French government was in a position to impose a temporary closure. It was a French affair. Wound down for lack of funds in 1981, Charlie Hebdo was resurrected in 1991 when cartoonists wanted to create a platform for political satire about the first Gulf War. With this explicitly international agenda the relationship between satirists, readers, and targets became more complex. The readers were the same left-wing French public, used to seeing fierce attacks on all things sacred, but the targets sometimes lay outside France or at least outside mainstream French culture. In 2002 the magazine hosted an article supporting controversial Italian author Oriana Fallaci and her claims that Islam in general, not just the extremists, was on the march against the West. In 2006, Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons of Muhammad and reprint of the Danish cartoonist Jyllands-Posten’s controversial Muhammad cartoons led to the paper’s selling 400,000 copies, rather than the normal 60,000 to 100,000. Popularity and notoriety had arrived through mockery of a target outside French culture but with which an aggrieved minority in France now identified. nybooks/blogs/nyrblog/2015/jan/16/charlie-hebdo-limits-satire/
Posted on: Tue, 20 Jan 2015 09:08:20 +0000
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