Charlie Hebdo (Charlie Weekly) is a French satirical weekly newspaper, featuring cartoons, reports, polemics and jokes. It appeared from 1969 to 1981, when it folded, and was resurrected in 1992. The current editor is cartoonist Charb. His predecessors are François Cavanna (1969–1981) and Philippe Val (1992–2009). Irreverent and stridently non-conformist in tone, the publication has a strongly left-wing, anarchist slant.

The magazine is published every Wednesday, with special editions issued on an unscheduled basis.

In 1960, Georges Bernier, and François Cavanna launched a monthly magazine entitled Hara-Kiri. Choron acted as the director of publication and Cavanna as its editor. Eventually Cavanna gathered together a team which included Roland Topor, Fred Othon Aristidès, Jean-Marc Reiser, Georges Wolinski, Georges "Gébé" Blondeaux, and Jean "Cabu" Cabut. After an early reader's letter accused them of being "dumb and nasty" ("bête et méchant"), the phrase became an official slogan for the magazine and made it into everyday language in France.

Tariq Ramadan (Arabic: طارق رمضان‎; born 26 August 1962 in Geneva, Switzerland) is a Swiss academic and writer. He is also a Professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies in the Faculty of Oriental Studies at Oxford University. He advocates the study and re-interpretation of Islamic texts, and emphasizes the heterogeneous nature of Western Muslims.

Tariq Ramadan is the son of Said Ramadan and Wafa Al-Bana, who was the eldest daughter of Hassan al Banna, who in 1928 founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Gamal al-Banna, the liberal Muslim reformer is his great-uncle. His father was a prominent figure in the Muslim Brotherhood and was exiled by Gamal Abdul Nasser from Egypt to Switzerland, where Tariq was born.

Tariq Ramadan studied Philosophy and French literature at the Masters level and holds a PhD in Arabic and Islamic studies from the University of Geneva. He also wrote a PhD dissertation on Friedrich Nietzsche, entitled Nietzsche as a Historian of Philosophy.

Alain Soral (born October 2, 1958) is a French essayist, and film maker, as well as being the author of several polemical essays. He is the brother of the actress Agnès Soral. Soral lives in the French Basque Country. Since June 2004, he has been a boxing coach. Alain Soral considers himself to be in the political "avant garde" of French society, claiming that his remarks and comments are always at first condemned and later widely accepted by the mainstream French public.

Soral was born in Aix-les-Bains, Savoie and grew up in the suburbs of Annemasse (department of Haute-Savoie), where he attended a local primary school. When Soral was about 12, his family moved to Meudon so that he could go to a reputable private Catholic high school, the Collège Stanislas de Paris. Soral spent two years doing small jobs before being accepted into the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts at 20, where he studied for two years. Soral was then taken in by a family of academics, who encouraged him to enrol at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, where he attended lectures given by Cornelius Castoriadis.

Guy Bedos (born 15 June 1934, in Algiers, French Algeria) is an actor (mostly known for his part in the film Nous irons tous au paradis) and a famous stand-up comedian .

He is also famous for his left-wing political affiliation and he had support politicians such as François Mitterrand.

Jean Bricmont (born April 12, 1952, Uccle) is a Belgian theoretical physicist, philosopher of science and a professor at the Université catholique de Louvain. He works on renormalization group and nonlinear differential equations.

He is mostly known to the non-academic audience for co-authoring Fashionable Nonsense (also known as Intellectual Impostures) with Alan Sokal, in which they criticise relativism in the philosophy of science. Jean Bricmont also collaborates with activist Noam Chomsky and campaigns on a variety of progressive causes.

In 2005 he published Impérialisme humanitaire. Droits de l’homme, droit d’ingérence, droit du plus fort ?, published in English as Humanitarian Imperialism in 2006.

In 2006, he wrote the preface to L'Atlas alternatif - Frédéric Delorca (ed), Pantin, Temps des Cerises [1]. He is a member of the Division of Sciences of the Royal Academy for Sciences, Letters and Arts of Belgium.

In 2007, he wrote an article in French discussing the possibility of a US invasion of Iran. "Pourquoi Bush peut déclencher une attaque contre l’Iran"