'If we could all laugh together a bit more...' Paris journalist Mark Tungate on Charlie Hebdo attack
I got the text from my wife – a journalist on the French magazine L’Express – just after lunch. “There are police outside our building. Have you heard the news?” I had not: I was busy writing about advertising. But I checked Twitter and my jaw unhinged.
Parisians show solidarity after Charlie Hebdo attack
At the same time, I was shocked by how unshocked I was. Over the past few months, I had been expecting something like this. France has a famously large Muslim community, and I couldn’t believe we’d escape an act of random violence from some kind of nutty splinter group – a “mutation”, as Salman Rushdie would have it.
But an armed attack on a satirical magazine was not on my list of potential occurrences. Of course, viewed coldly, it made perfect sense. Charlie Hebdo has been waging a war against religious extremism, and not a subtle one. Its cartoons are provocative, some might say tasteless. Its offices were firebombed in 2011. Its journalists were well aware of the risks they ran, and yet they continued, with a combination of bravery and – if I may say so – typical Parisian stubbornness.
The response to the event on social media was astonishing in its rapidity. Less than an hour after the attack, the 'Je suis Charlie' graphic began spreading virally; it was created by Joachim Roncin, art director of the French edition of Stylist magazine. “I created an image because I didn’t have the words,” he tweeted to another journalist.
Soon a call had gone out for a mass demonstration in the Place de la République, just around the corner from Charlie Hebdo’s offices in the 11th arrondissement. By the time I was considering shutting my laptop to head home – or rather, tackle the Parisian public transport system in a state of prickly high alert – the first images were coming in of people assembling in the square.
I wouldn’t go to the demonstration. My wife was working late, and I had to pick up my little boy from school. On my way there, however, I stopped off at my local café in Clichy, a cosmopolitan neighbourhood. A young Tunisian guy I vaguely knew beckoned me over to look at a funny video of his daughter. We chatted about our kids and then, in an oblique way, about the news. At the end he said: “If we could all laugh together a bit more, maybe none of this shit would happen.”
When I posted his comment on Facebook, it provoked a torrent of likes. Perhaps, then, there’s a glimmer of hope. The tension here is undeniable, but yesterday’s tragic events might actually bring our two communities closer together. They certainly won’t bring an end to freedom of speech in France. Or even, I hope, to Charlie Hebdo itself.
Mark Tungate is a Paris-based journalist and the editorial director of the Epica Awards