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| This picture taken on January 18, 2015 shows a giant
half-broken pencil near the headquarters of French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo in Paris. Image: Joël Saget/AFP/France 24 |
IN THE 12 months since the gruesome attacks on its Paris office, Charlie Hebdo has been praised, mourned, cursed and debated by a global panel of commentators, politicians and religious zealots - most of whom have never read it it, let alone understood it.
By all accounts it has been a tumultuous year for the satirical weekly – one that began with carnage, brought the cash-strapped paper fame and scrutiny, and left its traumatised survivors holed up in a bunker with more subscribers than they ever dreamt of having.
Charlie had been a household name in the French media landscape, its notoriety surpassed by that of its most illustrious cartoonists, including Jean Cabut (known as Cabu) and Georges Wolinski, two icons of French popular culture, both of whom were murdered a year ago by jihadist gunmen, along with six other staff members.
And yet its actual readership, barely reaching the tens of thousands, was a tiny – and shrinking – minority in a country where few people still read the papers, least of all in print.
