From tweets to graffiti: ‘I am Charlie’ as a ‘writing event’

A viral formula

Joachim Roncin was attending an editorial meeting at Stylist magazine when news of the shooting began to circulate:

I go to my office, watching my news feed. Our news feed, which is ultimately Twitter, is much more responsive than any news channel, or even radio … Still, my first reflex is to contact my son’s nanny, I really don’t live very far away, and I tell him to stay at home because there’s been an attack. So that’s my first reaction. My second reaction is to read all these messages that seem to me somehow too catastrophic for an event that I didn’t want to be catastrophic – for me, it couldn’t possibly be terrible. I didn’t imagine for a single second this degree of catastrophe. I ask my editor: ‘Are you going to write something?’ – this was on Twitter. And he replies no, there’s nothing to say. It’s true, it’s terrible. And then there’s a part of me who’s an artistic director, who wants to express himself, but more with a visual image than with words, because that’s my culture. And I type in ‘Charlie Hebdo’ on Google to have a look. And what I find brings it all back to me. There’s the logo that I’ve seen for so many years at my father’s, there’s the protesting, irreverent, subversive side, and strangely enough I wrote ‘I am Charlie’, to say that, well, there’s a part of me that has been affected.

Roncin, active as a journalist and graphic designer for several years, is bound to have links in his socio-professional environment, which could be described as ‘connected’ to the news, but also to social networks (Mercier, 2014). This was a milieu that was keeping an even closer watch on the news at the time of publication since the shooting at Charlie Hebdo was hot news requiring intense journalistic monitoring (with the story of the hunt for the terrorists), coupled with an emotional charge made even greater by their professional and even intimate relationship with the victims. When Roncin published the image, his Twitter account showed 400 subscribers; after just a few days, it would be several thousand. Louise Merzeau (2015) describes the circulation of the formula ‘I am Charlie’ as an ‘exemplary mediological phenomenon, combining the viral nature of micro-blogging, the visual impact of an easily recognizable minimalist logo and the illocutionary power of the utterance’. According to her, the way Twitter prioritizes news, based on a quantitative approach – the more views (or ‘likes’), the more visible the message – favoured this type of publication. Anonymity also seems to be constitutive of its success. The potentially divisive charge which could have been carried by the pronoun ‘I’ if the message had been clearly attached to a specific entity (Stylist, for example) or a known personality is defused by the anonymity of the author. Even today, while Roncin enjoys a reputation in the world of communication and journalism in Paris, he remains unknown to the general public.

A ‘mediagenic’ visual

The second factor that can explain the massive appropriation of this visual image is its aesthetics. The image is sober, stripped, and therefore easily reproducible. The typography is easily readable and visible. The choice of the background was the subject of careful reflection on the part of its author, which illustrates the durability of black as a colour of mourning in the Western collective imagination.

I’m doing it in black on a white background, and I’m actually looking at it, and I don’t know why I change it. I wasn’t aware at the time if there were any deaths. But I say to myself: it’s a tragedy, there’s a pretty official character to be observed, I’m going to put it in black, I’m going to reverse everything.

As Michel Pastoureau (2008) shows, black has been used in funerary rituals since Antiquity, but it was in the Middle Ages that this colour was really adopted to represent death and thoughts about the deceased. From the dark clothes worn at the funeral ceremonies to the armbands of football players, black is still a way of showing mourning in the public space. However, another and more recent set of symbolic meanings is also affiliated to black: it connotes elegance, simplicity and solemnity. By conforming to the social norms of mourning and the formal requirements of official documents, the visual image was thus able to circulate in the circles of the media, politics and commerce arenas without any modification.

First person statement and open interpretation

Finally, the success of this slogan lies in its interpretive openness: depending on their opinions and emotions, everyone can assign a variable semantic value to it. What does the name Charlie represent? First, it can designate the satirical periodical, and I am Charlie (Hebdo) would amount to defending the editorial line and its history. Second, Charlie can represent the newspaper team, so it is a tribute to the victims of terrorist acts and an expression of support to those close to them. Then, on a third, more general level, Charlie refers to journalistic activity as an embodiment of the principle of freedom of expression, a form of defence of the Republican pact and its associated values. Since the interpretative levels are not compartmentalized, some may be amalgamated or even contradictory. It is thus possible to say at the same time ‘I am Charlie’ (in the sense that one is paying homage to the victims and condemning terrorism), and ‘I am not Charlie’ (expressing a refusal to support the paper’s editorial line). This paradox led to standard formulae such as ‘I am not Charlie but I am his friend’ (‘Je ne suis pas Charlie mais je suis son ami’) or ‘I am not Charlie but I support the victims’ (‘Je ne suis pas Charlie mais je soutiens les victimes). Roncin, however, hit on his slogan immediately after the shootings at Charlie Hebdo, actually before the attacks of 8 and 9 January, thereby excluding some of the dead. In an attempt to incorporate the abandoned other victims, variations on the model ‘I am’ were observable such as the enumeration of the first names of the 17 victims or the partial identification by professional functions, religious or geographical identity (examples: I am a policeman, I am Jewish, I am Parisian). In addition, following the Republican march of 11 January, the formula acquired a new meaning, that of fraternal union.

The use of the ‘I’, for its part, has often been identified as the marker of an exaggerated individualism symptomatic of contemporary Western societies. However, speaking out in the first person in response to human or natural disasters is not new:

Digital social networks, by modifying the types of public reaction to attacks, have in reality only made more manifest a tendency already hugely at work in the reactions to the attacks of 9/11 and those in Madrid and London. Tens of thousands of people in Europe had already expressed their support for victims in the first person singular, and on their behalf, rather than putting forward an ‘us’. (Truc, 2015: 9)

In addition, the use of the first person singular is also constitutive of ‘the way in which movements of opinion and collective actions on the internet and social networks are structured’ (Badouard, 2016: 196). ³ The truly exceptional character of this formula seems to come from its circulation in the various public arenas. Only a few hours after its publication on Twitter, Roncin was contacted by Agence France Presse, and by several major national and international media. In fact, the vast majority of traditional media contributed to the spread of the formula, through various processes: by integrating it into an editorial, by displaying it as a mourning armband on the front page or near the channel’s logo, or by putting it en abîme with illustrations of the posters brandished by the protesters (Lefébure, 2016; Niemeyer 2016; Sécail, 2016). In addition, some media, in order to encourage their readership to attend rallies, provided the material means to display Roncin’s slogan – deliberately, by allowing internet users to download the visual image as a PDF, and indirectly by printing the image in newspapers, especially as a full-page spread. Participants could brandish these documents at demonstrations, like fetishes (Petrof, 2015), but also stick them on the windows of their homes or their places of work. From Twitter to the urban public space, I shall now show how the formula leapt over digital frontiers and was inscribed onto the walls of Paris.

‘Bricolage’ ⁴ and appropriations

This study of post-attack graffiti focuses on the first two weeks following the attack on the Charlie Hebdo editorial staff (8 January 2015 to 8 February 2015), as well as the Mondays of each week over the two months following the events (12 January to 9 March), i.e. a total of 22 days for the whole corpus.

Of the 8,678 graffiti recorded over this period, more than 90 per cent are tags – that is, signatures (Baudrillard, 1976; Kokoreff, 1988; Vulbeau, 1992) – a proportion consistent with that observed for several years. The remainder, which can be referred to by the antonym ‘non-tags’, included writings that were quite diverse but had one point in common: they addressed a message meant to be readable by all – contrary to the tags whose graphie or design makes it difficult, if not impossible, for a non-initiate to decipher them. These include statements of love, sexually suggestive writings, insults (especially attacking the police force), invective, humorous or crazy messages, and also graffiti on ideological or political topics: Clara Lamireau (2003), and Michel Kokoreff (1990) before her, designated these latter as ‘graffiti of content’.

It is within this category that I have distinguished two types of graffiti: first, those directly referring to the attacks (278 messages: names of the protagonists, restatements or variants of the ‘I am Charlie’ formula, iconographies specific to the event such as the raised fist or the pencil); and second, the customary messages of the public space. But even without information on the intentions of the writers and the precise date of their actions, some writings such as ‘peace’, ‘love’, or ‘freedom’ become intelligible in the light of the attacks. They are part of a network of writings and deliver a global message of pacifism and solidarity to the victims.

Graffiti relating to the attacks started to appear the day after the shootings at Charlie Hebdo, then many such productions in the days following the Republican march, which took place in the study area. Their number remained stable over the first fortnight, but gradually decreased in the following weeks.

Almost all of the messages are short and stereotypical statements, and a majority of them are appropriations of the ‘I am Charlie’ formula (Figure 2), offering a result comparable to that observed for the messages posted on grassroots memorials (Bazin, 2016), but with less diversity. The formula is sometimes accompanied by ornaments: a heart, an exclamation mark, an anarchist symbol – recurrent motif in the ‘wilder’ writings – but the design is often very simple. We also note the presence of the hashtag which, though specific to digital media, makes it possible to highlight the statement concerned, to identify it as a key word and especially to link it to a community of opinions. If we note a few variations on the formula – a slippage to the pronoun ‘we’, its translation into English – there is no reference to the attacks of 8 and 9 January, and the names of the victims are not highlighted, even though these practices are common in writings expressing solidarity. The graphic production as a whole is oriented towards a claim to freedom of expression: the formula ‘I am Charlie’ is supplemented by an entire iconography on this theme symbolized by pencils, presented in various ways, echoing the press drawings circulating in the media after the attacks. Beyond the cathartic effect of appropriation (mentioned earlier), we can see in these messages the material and concrete realization of the value defended. The very fact of writing in public space amounts to providing proof of this freedom. ‘I write your name, Liberty’ (‘J’écris ton nom, Liberté’), the refrain of Paul Eluard’s poem, a work regularly (re)quoted after January 2015, seems to come to fruition here (many graffiti with the single word ‘liberty’ can be found elsewhere in the corpus). Several graffiti also play on an interrogative rhetoric: ‘Where’s Charlie?’ ⁵ – a question to which the dozens of repetitions of the phrase ‘I am’ seem to answer: ‘everywhere’. Some messages thus refer to the famous graffiti ‘Kilroy was here’, ⁶ transformed here into ‘Charlie was here’, to signify his omnipresence and unlimited multiplication.

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Figure 2.

Various cases of ‘Je suis Charlie’ graffiti. © 2015 Korrigan company database. Reproduced with permission.

In an article on the promises of memory in response to the 9/11 attacks (on the model ‘we will not forget you’), Béatrice Fraenkel (2015) relates these statements to language acts (Austin, 1991). To speak, and here to write (Fraenkel, 2000), seem to involve doing something, performing an action. This performative effect is also found in the very inscribing of the formula ‘I am Charlie’. ‘It [the slogan] does what it states and states what it does’ (D’Huy, 2015). The performative effect is particularly convincing in messages that state Charlie is, or should be, alive: ‘Charlie isn’t dead’; ‘Charlie is alive’; ‘Charlie Hebdo lives forever’; ‘Charlie, you’re not dead’; ‘You wanted to kill Charlie, you’ve just made him immortal.’ These affirmations elevate the satirical newspaper, and/or the freedom of expression, depending on how they are read, into a value that is unshakeable and untouchable, being as it is infinite and immortal. It is a question of warding off fate (here the death of the newspaper editors), while endorsing a form of commitment to the values   defended by the latter, and more generally by the entire profession. It is another way of paying tribute to the victims, to confirming that they did not die in vain and that they – the individuals as well as the spirit of the newspaper – will live on through the bereaved.

The results of my study attest to a concentration of writings in the 11th arrondissement (about 40%), which can be explained by the proximity to the places of the attacks and the passage of the Republican march, but also by an ambient culture that is closely associated with graffiti – this area is one of the most graffiti-friendly. Indeed, the huge repetition of ‘I am Charlie’ in the corpus is also a result of the use of stencils, thus linking this atypical graphic activity to the world of street art. Many artists mobilized and directly encouraged the general public to include the slogan ‘I am Charlie’ on the street walls, such as Jef Aérosol who offered a template on the internet, and C215 who distributed them for free: ‘I want it to go viral. I call on people to take out their cans of aerosol and write it on dustbins, bags, t-shirts, walls and pavements. It’s needed everywhere’ (Christian, 2015: 52). These traces are found by the dozen in the Korrigan database. Other works by street artists are also observable in the corpus because they are produced outside institutionalized spaces, and have therefore been the subject of a policy of erasure identical to that of ‘wild’ graffiti (Kashink, Nico Avataar, Ariane Pasco, Codex Urbanus and BasteK, Philippe Hérard, Seven, Iza Zaro and others). In certain cases, it is then the fictional character who assumes the role of the enunciator of the formula, in particular by adding speech bubbles.

While graffiti are generally signed by the name of the artist or the group, graffiti of content are not, contrary to tributes on ephemeral memorials where various elements of the social identity of the writer can be found: name, pseudonym, collective membership, or even email or postal address. This voluntary anonymity cannot be explained simply by the illegal nature of the act but also by a tradition of utterance proper to collective political writing. ‘Non-signature then refers to an entre-soi [a sense of private but collective identity] a form of “auctorial” economy that is entirely consistent with the more general status of writing in public space’ (Cozzolino, 2017: 57). If the tributes registered are closer to the cards of condolence (in view of the relationship of intimacy established by the signature), post-attack graffiti draw on a repertoire of action marked by a culture of political protest. Thus, depending on the writing situation, the meaning of the phrase ‘I am Charlie’ varies.

The writings of denunciation are few in number, and are addressed primarily to the government, as part of a critique of national unity: ‘shit to national unity’ (‘merde à l’unité nationale’); ‘fuck of [sic] union sacrée’ (swearwords in English in the original); ⁷ ‘the government’s lying’ (‘le gouvernement mythone, the verb ‘mython(n)er’ suggests making myths, spreading falsehoods). Other, more virulent writings directly call for hatred and violence: ‘Let France burn like in Vincennes’, ‘I am Bin Laden’, ‘I am Charlie Koulibaly’ (Figure 3). ⁸ The latter repeats a sentence published on Facebook and Twitter by Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala, a French humourist, following his participation in the Republican march: ‘Know that tonight, as far as I’m concerned, I feel that I am Charlie Coulibaly’. This comment alludes to the attack on Charlie Hebdo’s editorial team and to the jihadist Amedy Coulibaly, the perpetrator of the attack on the kosher supermarket. The artist, already repeatedly condemned for anti-Semitism, was tried on a charge of ‘supporting terrorism’ in this case, and was given a two-month suspended prison sentence.

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Figure 3.

Graffiti. © 2015 Korrigan company database. Reproduced with permission.

Finally, out of the whole corpus, I have identified only two messages formulating Roncin’s slogan in negative terms: ‘I ain’t Charlie’ (‘chui pas Charlie’, 16 January, 8 rue Henri Chevreau 75020), ‘let’s decharlify Belleville’ (‘dé-charlifions Belleville’, 22 January, 37 rue de la Villette 75019), with the latter showing a particular verbal violence. The ‘non-Charlies’ are very much in a minority in the urban public space, as on digital networks (Badouard, 2016), although they are made significantly visible. These results question both the manner in which this movement of opinion is expressed and the democratic nature of these spaces of expression.

Given the modes of intervention observed in my study consisting of, for example, striking out the word ‘Charlie’ or making a comment (Figures 3 and 4), the ‘I am not Charlie’ camp seems more in a posture of opposition, of reaction to something rather than expressing a certain opinion. They present themselves against the current of unanimity. As Pierre Yves Baudot (2015) explains, the formula ‘I am Charlie’ has crystallized a consensus, i.e. ‘a process of alignment of positions’, which ‘then appears not as the natural state of things in the face of a dramatic event, but as the consequence of imposing a particular mode of reading events’. This is a standardization of discourse, one that the traditional media have helped to formalize by tackling the question of the ‘I am not Charlie’ camp only belatedly (Badouard, 2016). However, consensus hinders the democratic process:

As the irony of history would have it, the space of what can be said and done in this period has been reduced in the very name of freedom of expression. Consensus events are characterized by the reduction of the space of possible positions. (Baudot, 2015)

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Figure 4.

Graffiti, Paris. © Maëlle Bazin.

Thus, those who did not adhere to this injunction were stigmatized. So it is perhaps in reaction to the consensus, and to the summons it represents, that the ‘I am not Charlie’ camp expresses itself, rather than in propounding some pre-established opinion. ⁹ Ethnographic observations have also illustrated how, as the attack receded into the past, opposition to the phrase ‘I am Charlie’ became more common (Figure 4).

In this attempt to publicly display a rapprochement between the rulers and the ruled, and in order to preserve the social order, graffiti justifying the consensus were afforded exceptional measures of preservation.

Temporary sacralization of illegal writings

The double spread in Figure 5 comes from the February 2015 issue of the Vincennes local news magazine. The section ‘Focus on Images’ is devoted to the ceremonies in memory of the victims of the attacks. The ‘I am Charlie’ formula is ubiquitous in visual images, such as the graffiti (see illustration, on the left) on a public billboard in the town centre (30 minutes’ walk from the Hypercasher, the kosher hypermarket targeted by the taking and killing of hostages). The black background of the photographed medium directly echoes Joachim Roncin’s image; and the staging, with the tricolore in the background, legitimizes the graffiti as the official banner of mourning.

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Figure 5.

Rubric `Arrêt sur image’, Vincennes Info magazine n°708, February 2015, photos: © Brooklyn studio and P-Y Jan Aurianne studio.

I found traces of this graffiti in the databases of the cleaning company in charge of Vincennes; this message, as well as two others, benefited from a specially extended deadline decided by the mayor’s office. They remained visible for more than a month, whereas the statutory deadlines are generally 48 hours for a standard operation and 24 hours, or even less, for insulting ones. This suspension blurs the boundary between the lawful and the unlawful; the graffiti is temporarily accepted through a process of memorialization. By subscribing to a local conservation policy, the billboard is an indirect medium for institutional communication relating to current events.

After 2001 in New York, 2004 in Madrid and 2005 in London, an extension was also granted to writings posted or displayed in the public space by the public authorities (Fraenkel, 2002; Truc, 2017). In January 2015, the town of Vincennes is not the only one to have addressed this type of injunction, through more or less informal directives. Other town halls contacted private cleaning companies advising them not to immediately remove the ‘I am Charlie’ graffiti. This policy went hand in hand with that adopted with respect to the floral and paper tributes that remained for several weeks or even months on the pavements of the attacks. As for the Place de la République, it was completely cleaned and restored in August 2016, more than a year and a half after the appearance of the first writings expressing solidarity with the editorial staff of Charlie Hebdo. This targeted suspension – it did not concern all the ‘wild’ inscriptions – of deadlines that had after all been based on several decades of anti-graffiti struggle (Artières, 2013; Normand and Vilanova, 2015), supports the idea that a form of instrumentalization of these ephemeral expressions takes place, in the framework of commemorative and memorial policies. Urban writings thus temporarily acquire a special status, which can be described as ‘sacred’ (Bazin, 2017; Fraenkel, 2002; Gensburger, 2016; Senie, 2006). This adjective is all the more appropriate as the term ‘profanation’ has been used several times to describe the vandalism or withdrawal of certain messages (Le Parisien, 2015). These writings are presented as demonstrations coming from the people; they are spontaneous and authentic expressions that constitute a virtuous iconography of national unity. And, in light of recent events, this ‘writing event’ is part of a wider practice of mourning that tends to be ritualized in Europe.