What's at Stake in Europe's Response to Charlie Hebdo

After having his office firebombed and his website hacked, after being criticized by his own Prime Minister, Stéphane Charbonnier, a French cartoonist, spoke up for himself. “I don’t feel as though I’m killing someone with a pen,” he said, to Le Monde, in 2012. “I’m not putting lives at risk.” Charb, as he was known, indeed did not kill. But, as editorial director of Charlie Hebdo, a biting, bawdy, and terribly brave French satirical newspaper, he put his own life at risk, as he certainly knew. On Wednesday, masked gunman assassinated him and nine of his colleagues, as well as two police officers, for their work.

#JeSuisCharlie is trending all over Twitter, and Parisians are holding up pens, before the silhouette of delicate trees and carousels with yellow lights, to support their fallen confrères. It’s very likely that more people are demonstrating, horrified, than regularly read Charlie Hebdo. The magazine was strapped financially, and relatively fringe, mocking evenly the overinflated and overpowerful—man, creed, whatever. Many citizens who wouldn’t call it blasphemy might think it distasteful, or simply pointless, to print a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad bending over (to take just one example). But it was legal, and it was defensible: that, merci Voltaire, is what free speech is. President François Hollande, who hurried to the scene of the attack, said Wednesday, “Nobody in France should think that they can behave against the principle of the Republic and harm the spirit of the Republic, embodied by a newspaper.”