On 7 January 2015, at about 11:30 a.m. in Paris, France, the employees of the French satirical weekly magazine Charlie Hebdo were targeted in a terrorist shooting attack by two French-born Algerian Muslim brothers, Saïd Kouachi and Chérif Kouachi. Armed with rifles and other weapons, the duo murdered 12 people and injured 11 others; they identified themselves as members of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which claimed responsibility for the attack. They fled after the shooting, triggering a manhunt, and were killed by the GIGN on 9 January. The Kouachi brothers' attack was followed by several related Islamist terrorist attacks across the Île-de-France between 7 and 9 January 2015, including the Hypercacher kosher supermarket siege, in which a French-born Malian Muslim took hostages and murdered four people (all Jews) before being killed by French commandos.
In response to the shooting, France raised its Vigipirate terror alert and deployed soldiers in Île-de-France and Picardy. A major manhunt led to the discovery of the suspects, who exchanged fire with police. The brothers took hostages at a signage company in Dammartin-en-Goële on 9 January and were shot dead when they emerged from the building firing.
On 11 January, about two million people, including more than 40 world leaders, met in Paris for a rally of national unity, and 3.7 million people joined demonstrations across France. The phrase Je suis Charlie became a common slogan of support at rallies and on social media. The staff of Charlie Hebdo continued with the publication, and the following issue print ran 7.95 million copies in six languages, compared to its typical print run of 60,000 in French only.
Charlie Hebdo is a publication that has long courted controversy with satirical attacks on political and religious leaders. It published cartoons of the Islamic prophet Muhammad in 2012, forcing France to temporarily close embassies and schools in more than 20 countries amid fears of reprisals. Its offices were firebombed in November 2011 after publishing a previous caricature of Muhammad on its cover.
On 16 December 2020, 14 people who were accomplices to both the Charlie Hebdo and Jewish supermarket attackers were convicted. Three accomplices were not captured and were tried in absentia.
Charlie Hebdo (French for Charlie Weekly) is a French satirical weekly newspaper that features cartoons, reports, polemics, and jokes. Irreverent and stridently non-conformist in tone, the publication is strongly secularist, antireligious, and left-wing, publishing articles that mock Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, and various other groups as local and world news unfolds. First published in 1969, the magazine ran until 1981 and has been active again since 1992.
Charlie Hebdo has a history of attracting controversy. In 2006, Islamic organisations under French hate speech laws unsuccessfully sued over the newspaper's re-publication of the Jyllands-Posten cartoons of Muhammad. The cover of a 2011 issue retitled Charia Hebdo (French for Sharia Weekly), featured a cartoon of Muhammad, whose depiction is forbidden in most interpretations of Islam, with some Persian exceptions. The newspaper's office was fire-bombed and its website hacked. In 2012, the newspaper published a series of satirical cartoons of Muhammad, including nude caricatures; this came days after a series of violent attacks on U.S. embassies in the Middle East, purportedly in response to the anti-Islamic film Innocence of Muslims, prompting the French government to close embassies, consulates, cultural centres, and international schools in about 20 Muslim countries. Riot police surrounded the offices of the newspaper to protect it against possible attacks.
Cartoonist Stéphane "Charb" Charbonnier had been the director of publication of Charlie Hebdo since 2009. Two years before the attack he stated, "We have to carry on until Islam has been rendered as banal as Catholicism." In 2013, al-Qaeda added him to its most wanted list, along with three Jyllands-Posten staff members: Kurt Westergaard, Carsten Juste, and Flemming Rose. Being a sport shooter, Charb applied for a permit to be able to carry a firearm for self-defence. The application went unanswered.
Numerous violent plots related to the Jyllands-Posten cartoons were discovered, primarily targeting cartoonist Westergaard, editor Rose, and the property or employees of Jyllands-Posten and other newspapers that printed the cartoons. Westergaard was the subject of several attacks and planned attacks, and lived under police protection for the rest of his life. On 1 January 2010, police used guns to stop a would-be assassin in his home, who was sentenced to nine years in prison. In 2010, three men based in Norway were arrested on suspicion of planning a terror attack against Jyllands-Posten or Kurt Westergaard; two of them were convicted. In the United States, David Headley and Tahawwur Hussain Rana were convicted in 2013 of planning terrorism against Jyllands-Posten.
In France, blasphemy law ceased to exist with progressive emancipation of the Republic from the Catholic Church between 1789 and 1830. In France, the principle of secularism (laïcité – the separation of church and state) was enshrined in the 1905 law on the Separation of the Churches and the State, and in 1945 became part of the constitution. Under its terms, the government and all public administrations and services must be religion-blind and their representatives must refrain from any display of religion, but private citizens and organisations are free to practise and express the religion of their choice where and as they wish (although discrimination based on religion is prohibited).
In recent years, there has been a trend towards a stricter interpretation of laïcité which would also prohibit users of certain public services from expressing their religion (e.g., the 2004 law which bans school pupils from wearing "blatant" religious symbols) or ban citizens from expressing their religion in public even outside the administration and public services (e.g., a 2015 law project prohibiting the wearing of religious symbols by the employees of private crèches). This restrictive interpretation is not supported by the initial law on laïcité and is challenged by the representatives of all the major religions.
Authors, humourists, cartoonists, and individuals have the right to satirise people, public actors, and religions, a right which is balanced by defamation laws. These rights and legal mechanisms were designed to protect freedom of speech from local powers, among which was the then-powerful Catholic Church in France.
Though images of Muhammad are not explicitly banned by the Quran itself, prominent Islamic views have long opposed human images, especially those of prophets. Such views have gained ground among militant Islamic groups. Accordingly, some Muslims take the view that satire of Islam, of religious representatives, and, above all, of Islamic prophets constitute blasphemy in Islam, punishable by death. This sentiment was most famously actualised in the murder of the controversial Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh. According to the BBC, France has seen "the apparent desire of some younger, often disaffected children or grandchildren of immigrant families not to conform to western, liberal lifestyles – including traditions of religious tolerance and free speech".
On the morning of 7 January 2015, a Wednesday, Charlie Hebdo staff were gathered at 10 Rue Nicolas-Appert in the 11th arrondissement of Paris for the weekly editorial meeting starting around 10:30. The magazine had moved into an unmarked office at this address following the 2011 firebombing of their previous premises due to its original satirisation of Muhammad.
Around 11:00 a.m., two armed and hooded men first burst into the wrong address at 6 Rue Nicolas-Appert, shouting "Is this Charlie Hebdo?" and threatening people. After realising their mistake and firing a bullet through a glass door, the two men left for 10 Rue Nicolas-Appert. There, they encountered cartoonist Corinne "Coco" Rey and her young daughter outside and at gunpoint, forced her to enter the passcode into the electronic door.