Charlie Hebdo Shooting: World's Newspapers React With Front-Page Cartoons, Coverage In Support Of Paris Magazine

Newspapers around the world devoted their front page to Charlie Hebdo Thursday with stories, graphics and editorials denouncing the massacre at the Paris magazine. The Wednesday attack on the French magazine's office left 12 dead, including editor Stephane "Charb" Charbonnier and cartoonists Georges Wolinski, Bernard "Tignous" Verlhac and Jean "Cabu" Cabut. Charlie Hebdo was allegedly targeted for its cartoons mocking Islam.

French newspapers made strong statements about the incident Thursday, with several choosing to black out their front pages. It dominated the home page of Le Monde, which compared the slaughter to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States. An editorial called the deceased "soldiers of liberty ... dead for drawings" and urged France to unite against the violence and protect freedom.

A black banner reading "We are all Charlie" stretched across the Libération paper's website. Its editorial drove that point home, saying, "They missed their shot. Charlie will live, thanks to his readers, Charlie will live in the spirit of us all. ... By killing our friends, they battered us, but they fortified us," according to a loose translation.

L'Humanité devoted its entire home page to the shooting, with individual obituaries for Wolinski, Charb, Cabu and Tignous, as well as news stories reported from the streets of Paris. Its main image was the back "Je suis Charlie" image with superimposed text from the paper's director, Patrick Le Hyaric, saying "We mourn our colleagues, friends, comrades." Its editorial condemned the "barbarian" attacks on the journalists, saying, "Faced with war machines, they only had their pens in defense."

La Croix and Le Figaro focused their coverage on reactions to the shooting. Both prominently featured stories about the social media movement #JeSuisCharlie, with the latter calling it "three words to symbolize the emotion of a planet." Le Figaro also included Charb's words as its quote of the day: "I'd rather die standing than live on my knees."

Outside of France, almost every major newspaper in Europe put the Charlie Hebdo shooting on its front page, with many reprinting the satirical magazine's cartoons or designing special covers about the incident. South American media outlets devoted slightly less coverage to the event, but Asian publications printed the least about the events, largely featuring stories about other topics.

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