As France prepares to commemorate the third anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo attack, FRANCE 24 visited the Parisian neighbourhood where the shootings took place to ask locals if they still stand by, “Je suis Charlie.”
When she sees the graffiti with the murdered Charlie Hebdo cartoonists’ smiling faces, Lidya Tchilinkirian breathes a sigh of relief. “The little Hitler moustache that someone had drawn on the faces of Charb, Cabu, Wolinski and Tignous has finally been removed. Just in time for the commemoration of the attack,” says the pensioner as she walks by the satirical paper’s former office, where jihadist gunmen killed 11 people on January 7, 2015.
As France prepares to mark the third anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, the defacement of commemorative graffiti in rue Nicolas Appert is a sign that the “Je suis Charlie” spirit has diminished since the January 11, 2015 demonstrations where millions of people took to the streets across the country to support freedom of expression.