Devant l'Hyper Cacher, hommage à toutes les victimes, dont celles de Charlie. MAXPPP – Christophe Petit Tesson
Les 7, 8 et 9 janvier 2015, des attaques terroristes islamistes tuaient à la rédaction de l’hebdomadaire satirique, à la supérette de la Porte-de-Vincennes, ou à Montrouge.
There are anniversaries that we would like to never celebrate. But which concern events of which nothing would be worse than to see them fall into oblivion. This is the case for what is most often called “the Charlie Hebdo attack”, which is already incomplete, and which validates, in fact, the need to return to it.
What we are commemorating here, and which will be commemorated throughout the country this week, is in fact the terrorist attacks that bloodied Paris and stunned the country between January 7 and 9, 2015. Their toll, ten years later, still chills the blood.
Seventeen dead, twenty-two injured
Seventeen dead. Twelve during the assault on the weekly’s offices in the 11th arrondissement: eleven people present at the scene (a maintenance worker, and ten employees or guests of the newspaper), and a police officer who was trying to prevent the escape of the shooters, the brothers Chérif and Saïd Kouachi Kouachi.
A young policewoman murdered in Montrouge, the next day, by Amedy Coulibaly, a friend of the siblings. Four people killed on January 9 in the Hyper Cacher supermarket, Porte-de-Vincennes, in which Amedy Coulibaly, who was targeting Jews, took customers and staff hostage.
The three terrorists killed
The three terrorists were killed on January 9. The Kouachis, by the GIGN forces, in a printing press in Seine-et-Marne, where they had taken refuge. Coulibaly by the RAID and BRI men during the assault on the Hyper Cacher. 22 people were also injured during these various events.
200% Deposit Bonus up to €3,000 180% First Deposit Bonus up to $20,000Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula claimed responsibility for the attack against Charlie Hebdo, a newspaper hated for having published caricatures of Mohammed. Coulibaly himself will claim, via a video, to have acted on behalf of the Islamic State, which the organization will not confirm.
The litany of horrors
Ten years later, we can only observe that these three days marked the end of one world and the beginning of another. Often for the worst, especially during this year 2015, punctuated by other horrors, and ended by the tragic night of November 13 in Paris, and the successive attacks carried out at the Stade de France, on the terraces of the 10th and 11th arrondissements, and at the Bataclan.
The litany will continue in 2016, a year mourned by the 86 dead of the July 14 attack in Nice, by the assassination of the police officer and his partner in Magnanville, or by the death of Father Hamel whose throat was cut in his church in Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray.
Then Carcassonne, Trèbes or Strasbourg for the Christmas market, then Samuel Paty in Éragny-sur-Oise, then Dominique Bernard in Arras, the list seems endless.
Aborted attacks, or narrowly avoided
Especially considering the parallel one of the aborted or miraculously avoided tragedies of Poitiers, where the town hall was recently targeted before the arrest of those who wanted to carry out the act, in La Grande-Motte, with, this summer, the explosion of a gas cylinder that set fire to the synagogue half an hour before the start of the Shabbat service.
And for historical reasons, we would certainly have to go back to the dark days of March 2012, with the killings in Toulouse and Montauban perpetrated by Mohammed Merah, if we wanted to find the founding act of the Islamist attacks perpetrated on French soil, and born in the Al-Qaeda nebula.
Republican marches gigantic
But that said, everything leads back to Charlie, and to January 7th. With November 13th and the Bataclan, these dates remain the cataclysms that swept everything away, and that still determine much of what makes up French society in this first quarter of the 21st century, in its divisions and its torments. Throughout the world, we were Charlie for a few weeks, and gigantic republican marches, never seen since the Liberation, swept across the country on January 10th and 11th.
“A tragic signal”
But already, very quickly, nuances were emerging, outside our borders in particular. Without us initially attaching much importance to them. In the United States and the United Kingdom, many media outlets had covered the affair by blurring the Charlie cartoons depicting Mohammed. And four years later, the New York Times decided to stop publishing political cartoons.
“Source of too much trouble” as the press cartoonist Coco (who holds the position at Libération, she was present at Charlie on January 7) recently confided to the magazine Casemate. “A tragic signal” she lamented.
A subject that will also certainly be at the heart of this week's debates for history and memory
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