Four years on from the massacre, Charlie Hebdo's satire is still stinging

Since November 2018, Paris has played witness to nine ‘Acts’ of fierce Gilets Jaunes street protests, and the fourth anniversary of the 7 January 2015 Charlie Hebdo Islamist massacres. The Gilets Jaunes have been physically, and in some cases, violently occupying the public space: at roundabouts, motorway toll booths and on the Champs Elysées. Meanwhile Charlie has been attempting to keep alive its brand of belligerent humour from its anonymous, heavily protected bunker.

The anniversary of the attacks has brought forth fresh commentary on the newspaper. Nonetheless, it is hard, even four years later, to pigeonhole this once-marginal newspaper that found itself a reluctant poster child for freedom of expression in France. The Je Suis Charlie movement that brought it in from the margins of the French press has, at least abroad, occluded the fact that its pages are filled with swipes at France’s ruling classes. Many among the Gilets Jaunes, meanwhile, have been attacking the mainstream media for being in cahoots with the ruling elite, but this hasn’t included Charlie: still too small and too marginal.

But how has Charlie been responding to the populist, heterogeneous movement, and its bids to disrupt Macron’s presidency?

French sociologist Jean-Pierre Le Goff has branded the social media-fuelled, largely leaderless Gilets Jaunes movement as the “revenge of the beauf”. Cartoonist Cabu, a victim in the Charlie Hebdo attacks, created the beauf character in the 1970s. It roughly translates as ‘my bruv-in-law’, and is comparable to the ‘gammon’ insult in Brexit Britain, implying a lowbrow, chauvinistic, borderline racist Frenchman. Has Charlie also consecrated the Gilets Jaunes movement as a bunch of beaufs?

In a word: no.

Charlie’s longstanding environmentalism put something of a brake on it supporting the Gilets Jaunes’ opposition to Macron’s now-cancelled fuel tax hikes. On November 28, the ever-acidic cartoonist, Salch, contributed a caustic sketch of Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, with the Gilets Jaunes being ‘led’ atop a car. But as early as November 11, contributor Jean-Yves Camus warned not to “dismiss the legitimate feeling of marginalisation, impoverishment and class contempt” underpinning the movement.  While Charlie’s trademark loud cartooning has poked fun at some of the Gilets Jaunes’ stunts, its articles have been much more responsive to the complexity of the cause.

Charlie has used black humour to pillory Macron’s plight, frequently with anti-monarchist verve. A cartoon by Foolz on 12 December depicts Macron’s guillotined head addressing the nation, while Coco sketched Macron using a Gilet Jaune protester as an eco-friendly rental scooter. Gérard Biard has quipped that the technocratic Macron who wanted a startup nation now has an exceptionally dynamic one camped outside the Elysée.

Charlie has certainly echoed, humorously or otherwise, critiques of the Gilets Jaunes movement: in thrall to social media rumour, incoherent in its objectives or mindlessly destructive. Yet contributors have also expressed solidarity. Journalist Fabrice Nicolino has said: “How easy is it to sneer at the gilets jaunes and write them off as beaufs […] Insulting the real people who have been worn down by decades of unbearable economic and territorial policies […] Count me out”.

Charlie Hebdo has also sent its contributors around the country to interview and sketch the protesters. Cartoonist Juin celebrates the solidarity he found at a Gilets Jaunes camp in Lorraine, quoting a retiree, Chantal: “We only used to know each other by sight. Now we’re getting to know each other, it’s so nice!” ‘Félix’, reporting from Le Pouzin in the Ardèche, evokes Asterix, calling the camp an indomitable, ungovernable village resisting the centralised powers of Macron as Cesar. Antonio Fischetti enjoyed spending time alongside protesters in wealthy western Paris: “Of course, it’s not very nice to break windows. But if it meant freaking out the bourgeoisie just for the afternoon, good gracious, it was a memorable moment”.

In its patchwork coverage of the Gilets Jaunes, in its playfulness, Charlie Hebdo continues its off-beat dance with current affairs. Its cartoon lines whisper that there can and should be more than one way to look at the news; more than one way to draw it, to interact with it. Inviting the reader to step in closer, beyond the rowdy front page, to see that the written editorials are the subtle notes that add the music to the staccato beat of the cartoons.

Its continued intermingling of voices, silenced though many were, does not seek to force readers into sharing a particular viewpoint. It does invite them to notice and, indeed, stick up for the incongruous: for that which does not quite add up, for everything that cannot be stuck into a spreadsheet in the very technocratic manner one might associate with Macron. Although undeniably ambivalent, Charlie seems to instinctively grasp the unruliness of the Gilets Jaunes movement. It does not write them off as beaufs, while standing at one pace removed, keeping some critical and satirical distance. It may have tentatively migrated onto the internet and even onto social media, but four years after the massacre, Charlie‘s attachment to pen and ink, to paper and people, appears stronger than ever.

Dr Jane Weston Vauclair is the author of De Charlie Hebdo à Charlie: Enjeux, histoire, perspectives.