Dior designer John Galliano consumed the buzz at prêt-a-porter fashion week in Paris in February after he screamed anti-Semitic insults during a bar fight in Paris. (He was eventually convicted by a French court.) Charlie Hebdo jumped at the chance to combine two of its longstanding targets, celebrities and French right-wingers. The cover showed Marine Le Pen, the daughter of the far-right politician who founded France’s National Front party, as a mannequin in Galliano’s fashion house. Le Pen is currently challenging President Nicolas Sarkozy from the right in the 2012 presidential election.
‘DSK for President!’ (2011)
The news that Dominique Strauss-Kahn had been arrested in New York in May on charges of sexual harassment caused a tsunami in French politics. The director of the International Monetary Fund had been a leading candidate for the French presidency in 2012, but his tarnished reputation meant the Socialist Party would face an internal war to find a new candidate. In July, Charlie Hebdo celebrated the chaos with this cover, showing DSK parading through a confetti-like shower of condoms.
Leave it to Charlie Hebdo to dare to run a humorous take on the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks just weeks after the fact. The magazine’s Nov. 14, 2001, issue showed Osama bin Laden joking about pulling off the attacks on New York with “no hands.”
This cover, one of many mocking the Catholic Church, depicted Pope Benedict XVI holding a Durex condom aloft, declaring “This is my body!”—a line from the Christian eucharist that refers to Christ’s crucifixion. The cover came after a series of confusing statements by the pope about the rare instances in which the church approves of condom use to prevent disease.
Just three years after the student riots of 1968, French cartoonist Georges Wolinski drew the cover cartoon with a caption that captured Charlie Hebdo’s withering antigovernment bent and became an instant classic: “Vote asshole … you don’t have a choice.”
Religion is far from the magazine’s only punching bag: French politicians provide lots of material as well. This cover mocked the nepotism of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who tried to get his 23-year-old son, then a first-year law student, a job running Paris’s most important financial district.
Lest you think Charlie Hebdo reserves all its vicious covers for Muslims, be assured it’s an equal-opportunity offender. Before its editor was acquitted of charges from the Muhammad cartoons, Charlie Hebdo published a special issue of cartoons with a cover depicting a Jew, the pope, and an Islamic fundamentalist shouting, “Charlie Hebdo must be veiled!”
‘Muhammad Overwhelmed’ (2006)
Arguably Charlie Hebdo’s most controversial cover, the Feb. 9, 2006, issue featured a weeping Muhammad with the headline, “Muhammad Overwhelmed by Fundamentalists.” (In the dialogue bubble, he’s saying, “It’s hard being loved by assholes.”) But the real offense was what was inside: the 12 cartoons originally published by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten that caricatured Islam’s holiest prophet.