Ten years ago this week, two brothers, born and educated in France, used guns to murder twelve people who held pens. The brothers decided that twelve people deserved a capital sentence for the crime of drawing. Put differently, this was one of those rare times in our messy, convoluted world when absolutely everything was clear, when there was no ambiguity, or opaqueness, but simply a choice between two brothers holding guns and twelve people holding pens.
These murders occurred during an editorial meeting for Charlie Hebdo, a weekly magazine that’s partly comedic, partly political, partly social, partly cultural, and completely irreverent. Founded in 1970, the magazine is bombastic, and suitably disdainful of anybody who looks downward from a great height, whether that person is political, religious, or just a common citizen without any common sense. Amid the barbs and snipes and quips—often about the most serious subjects, those subjects which in fact require the most jokes—the basic principle of the magazine is that nothing is sacred and that your tongue must, at all times, be placed firmly in your cheek.
Two brothers disputed this principle on January 7, 2015, and the most comprehensive and poignant account of that morning in Paris and its aftermath comes from Philippe Lançon in Disturbance: Surviving Charlie Hebdo. Lançon was disfigured on that day and assumed dead by his attackers:
In front of me, almost under the table, was Bernard’s body, and, right next to it, in the passage and on its back, was that of Tignous. At the time, I didn’t see what the police report, which I read eighteen months later, revealed to me: a pencil remained planted right between the fingers of one hand, in a vertical position. Tignous was drawing or writing when they burst in. Tignous died with his pencil in his hand like an inhabitant of Pompeii seized by the lava, still faster, without even knowing that the eruption had taken place and that the lava was coming, without being able to flee the killers by disappearing into the drawing that he was making. Every cartoonist probably drew to have the right to escape into what he drew, just as every writer ended up dissolving himself, for a time, in what he was writing.
How grotesque it is when the figurative transforms into the literal, when all that you should love—what’s literary, filled with wit, playful—is subsumed by all that you should hate—the barbaric, insular, censorious. To the question of the brothers’ motive, the subject feels slippery. The brutality of the act nullifies any consideration of motive. Plainly, there’s nothing that you can possibly think, claim, or draw while scribbling a pen across a paper that mandates violence—because once there’s physicality, it no longer matters what was said, or drawn, however supposedly repulsive, however supposedly uncouth, as the murders supersede the conversation.
So: there’s no requirement here to explain that Charlie Hebdo publishes articles and cartoons that mock politicians, celebrities, movements, Catholicism, Judaism, and Islam, and that its images, in particular, of Muhammad have been accompanied by multiple threads and multiple attacks around the world. The phrase ‘accompanied by’ is chosen because the alternatives—such as resulted or sparked or caused—give the impression of equivocation, linking speech and act. And there’s a reasonable argument that dividing these two concepts is what humanity has been working toward for a few thousand years.
As a publication, Charlie Hebdo turns its ironic gaze onto most subjects caught by the public eye—consider, in just recent years, the Italian earthquakes, the crash of Metrojet Flight 9268, the 2016 Brussels bombings, the person and persona of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. For many people, and perhaps most people, this list of its most infamous subjects for mockery is crass, offensive, even shocking, although these reactions often reveal a remarkable illiteracy, especially in the inability to distinguish between the subject and target of a joke.
What’s curious about offensive jokes is that they only work if you know what’s right: there’s nothing notable about a cutting, abhorrent line if you can’t comprehend that the subject is horrific. An offensive joke to an actual sadist is simply a statement. Yet many readers insist on believing that those who speak with one raised eyebrow, and a knowing smirk, are somehow making declarations, even though the actual sadists in our world aren’t also humorists.
What’s actually tasteless? How about stabbing two people in front of the former Charlie Hebdo offices in 2020 because you’re unaware that the paper moved locations. What’s not tasteless? Laughing at the folly of a fundamentalist who doesn’t maintain an updated address book. The stabbing, of course, is what’s profane, indecent, vulgar, and indefensible, and the laughter is merely the humane response after you’ve stopped crying.
But there’s a point where this becomes misleading and even pompous. In writing about these events, it is easy to be subsumed by grand principles, by timeless, vital aspects of civilization, to think about Voltaire and Locke and Milton, yet that impulse overlooks something more fundamental: there was an ease, an insouciance, in the editorial room before the attackers arrived. Lançon describes a prosaic and playful setting where the ironic mind prevailed.
…on that morning, as on all the others, humor, shouting, and a theatrical form of indignation were the judges and guides, the good and evil geniuses, in a very French tradition that was worth what it was worth, but what was to follow showed that most of the world didn’t appreciate it.
The rupture occurred when the literal mind—the mind that speaks with weapons—rejected that ironic mind. And what’s lost in that moment is perhaps what’s most fragile in society. For thousands of years, violence served as the primary mode of disagreement, as the accepted, customary manner of dealing with honor, or offense, while irony and satire and nonviolence remain unnatural, unusual, for nearly every human life. If you consider history, in its full and commonplace brutality, then the editorial meeting becomes the exception, and a fragile one, too, one that’s unusual in caring more about language than power, more about the ironic than the literal. And with this view the brothers’ reaction also appears as a typical, almost humdrum, response, all too human, all too predictable, all too easy.
The bike that Lançon rode that morning, still chained outside the Charlie Hebdo offices months later, is one remnant from his unlived life. Disfigured, confined to the hospital for most of the year, often unable to speak, a reader can’t help but note the irreparability of a few minutes on a January morning. It takes longer for that awareness to reach Lançon although, when he does confront the truth, he retreats into the subjects that he knows—literature, writing, painting—in a struggle to understand his fate.
One of his first trips from the hospital, now accompanied by his omnipresent police escort, is to a museum. He writes, reads, and rereads, often the same pages of Proust, seeking answers and reason and a language to articulate the devastation in his life. The physical isn’t avoided—in fact the toil of surgery after surgery is scrawled into the chapters. But it’s offered as almost a nuisance to the Lançon that’s searching for answers in the one place where he knows to look. What makes this such a propulsive and worthwhile document is his ability to add texture and nuance and history to an experience that is, otherwise, horrific.
I had never so extensively tried out the Proustian sentence before; writing was in fact the product of a different self, a product intended precisely to get me out of the condition I was in, even if it consisted in describing that condition. I wrote about a picture by Velásquez in Libération just as I wrote about my series of surgeries in Charlie, to enter into the former and to escape from the latter. I also wrote to transmit an experience, but most of the reactions reminded me of Céline’s cruel remark: ‘Experience is a dark lantern that illuminates only the person who carries it.’
It would be naive, and callous, to call Lançon’s fate redemptive, and he certainly avoids that reading—the alternative path, the one where he takes the bike home on that January morning, is affirmatively the better path and it isn’t wrong to admit that truth. Lançon refuses any notion of redemption, but he also refuses to wallow in self-pity, deeming both reactions unsuited to the body he now inhabits. Readers may not share the same pains, the same struggles, but they’ve been drafted into the same intellectual conflict, whether or not they’ve accepted that consequence of living in the contemporary world. Perhaps the redemptive quality of his writing might apply best to those readers, those attempting to comprehend the society that they no longer recognize.
If you do look to the news, or literature, or Charlie Hebdo, to comprehend the society around you, with its frenetic and unpredictable qualities, you’ll discover all our contemporary binaries: west and east, Christianity and Islam, liberalism and conservatism, accelerationist and degrowth, modernism and traditionalism—without much space between the trenches. It is worth remembering that the common practice throughout history for organizing society is that the strongest authority determines what’s just. Norms flow from the whims of the powerful, which is, well, less than ideal. Any alternative—such as tossing a few laws onto the books, treating people as individuals, arguing about process—forces you to accept that people will respond differently to life, which is one way to describe that editorial meeting, full of disagreement and debate and opinions, without any hint of violence until the brothers arrived. After a few thousand years of determining correctness by possession of the largest club, that editorial meeting was attempting something a little different, and that’s still, at this date in history, unusual.
One irony of Lançon’s description of those final minutes is that the accusation of offense is, in the best possible sense, true—the people in that room weren’t shy about berating, criticizing, or mocking ideas. But that’s a truth that’s only visible and valuable and even redemptive if you can separate your disrespect for ideas with your respect for people. The ironic—at its most incisive—is perhaps the best way of discovering the limits of ideas, the limits of society. And if there are subjects that you can’t touch with irony, then those are probably the most important subjects for irony.
In all the times that I’ve referred to books over the years, there are always caveats, subtleties, warnings, an awareness that a book depends on when you read it and your state in that moment. But this account, in my mind, requires fewer qualifications. Le Lambeau is the French title for Lançon’s book, and it translates as The Flap, referring to the surgical flap of skin taken from his leg to reconstruct his jaw. (Pause for a moment and note the literal mind at work in the banal and diluted English title of Disturbance: Surviving Charlie Hebdo.) Read it for the story, yes, but read it also for its literary elements, for the way it positions a man within larger events and describes how those events reverberate, in his culture, for his friends, inside his mind. Perhaps, for some readers, it might feel tedious, or simply depressing. Many parts are shocking, just like in life. The prose might be overly verbose and digressive for some—especially those seeking conclusions. At least those readers can decide to put the book down and go do something else—the response, the only civilized response, to encountering something that you find distasteful.
I always respect how you manage to be both measured and passionate, and how you can pick up a topic and see it in a new way.