Photo illustration by Slate.
On Wednesday, masked gunmen attacked the offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo killing at least 12 people. While both the motive and the identity of the perpetrators are still unknown, the magazine is famous for its controversial cartoon covers. (Today’s cover features novelist Michel Houellebecq smoking a cigarette with the caption “In 2022, I will do Ramadan.” His latest novel,Submission, is said to be about a future France run by Muslims.) While they’ve mocked everything from Sept. 11 to Michael Jackson, Charlie Hebdo has riled up the most controversy when covering religion, particularly the Prophet Mohammed—who many Muslims believe it is forbidden to depict.
In 2006, the magazine featured Mohammed weeping with the headline “Mohammed Overwhelmed by Fundamentalism.” This was the cover of the issue that also featured reprinted cartoons from the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Postenthat caricatured the prophet. Jacques Chirac, French president at the time, denounced the magazine and Muslim groups sued, but courts eventually ruled inCharlie Hebdo’s favor.
Perhaps the issue of the magazine that inspired the largest international reaction was published in 2012, and sports a cover depicting an orthodox Jewish man pushing a Muslim man in a wheelchair. The headline reads “Intouchables 2,” a spoof of the movie The Intouchables—at the time, France’s second biggest box-office hit—in which a rich white man who is paralyzed from the neck down hires a black ex-con from the projects to be his caretaker. But, as with the 2006 cover, the deeper controversy came on the next page with a satire of another movie, this time Innocence of Muslims, in which an ex-con paid people to act out scenes that had nothing to do with Islam before replacing the audio to create a terrible movie ridiculing the Prophet Mohammed.
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