(Radio France) This is the fourth anniversary of the terrorist attack against the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Twelve people died at the hands of two radical Islamic attackers, who also killed Ahmed Merabet, a police officer who was on foot patrol near the Charlie Hebdo premises.
Four years on, the survivors who still produce the weekly paint an embittered picture of a French society which appears to have turned its back on the Enlightenment values of rationality, debate and the acceptance of differences.
“A lot of people have already given up,” says Riss, the caricaturist and current editor of Charlie, himself shot in the shoulder during the attack. His complaint is not simply that the personal tragedies have been forgotten. Riss feels that France has turned its back on what happened, that the enemy is not just religious extremism but a large part of the French intelligensia.
