?...Since its founding in 1970, the satirical magazine has delighted in transgressing the moral and aesthetic taboos of most everyone. But it has reserved a special, obsessive disdain for the world's organized religions. In 2011, after Catholic extremists in the city of Avignon vandalized "P!ss Christ," the photograph of a plastic crucifix submerged in urine, Charlie Hebdo produced a cover cartoon featuring rolls of toilet paper labeled "Bible," "Koran," and "Torah." The headline read: "In the sh!tter, all the religions."

"We are a French newspaper," Biard told me in 2012, engaged in the defense of "French" values. In an interview with the Swiss public broadcaster RTS after last week's attack on his publication, he said: "Laïcité is not just some abstract idea. It is a moral value, and I believe today, one must recognize that laïcité is perhaps the prime moral value of our Republic. Because without it, Liberté, Égalité, and Fraternité isn't possible."

In the France of 2015, this sort of ideological retrenchment is hardly radical. As is the case throughout Europe, Islam is seen by many here--with the possible exception of most French Muslims themselves--as a challenge to the country's notion of itself. Biard's words, in fact, could easily have been spoken by almost any politician here, from any political party, including the far-right National Front. However radical Charlie Hebdo's mode of expression, the ideas it is promoting are not.

The word laïcité has been used, from the end of the 19th century on, to mean the freedom of public institutions, especially primary schools, from the influence of the Catholic Church[9] in countries where it had retained its influence, in the context of a secularization process. Today, the concept covers other religious movements as well.