The recent tragic events in Paris have made Charlie Hebdo a household name. Charlie Hebdo has been in existence since the late sixties and reflected the French youth’s “Esprit du Temps”: irreverent, anticlerical, antimilitarist, anticapitalist and a taste for raunchiness.
As times changed Charlie Hebdo aimed its secular shock satire at the growing Islamic awareness within the huge French North African immigrant population.
In a broader context, the events surrounding Charlie Hebdo have brought to center stage
the complex and tortuous relationship between France and Islam, a relationship that goes back 1300 years with a great many components.