A little more Charlie

The finest of the Mohammed caricatures, I think, was Cabu's from 2006, in the wake of the Jyllands-Posten riots, which showed a little sympathy for the old Prophet overwhelmed by intégristes or fundamentalists and doing a double facepalm: "It's tough being loved by cons..." (the word, etymologically referring to the vagina, has much less force than English "cunt" and is more of an equivalent to "asshole").

On the whole, though, the worst thing for posterity about the murders of the Charlie Hebdo staff is that these heroes may be remembered for what wasn't their best work, the relatively crude and satirically unpointed drawings of 2011 and 2012 showing the naked Prophet eating his own shit or posing as Brigitte Bardot. They were so much better taking on the frisky College of Cardinals:

Suis-je Charlie?

For a moment I was afraid this meant he was dead, but of course he was born a long time before 1994.

"Nous sommes tous des juifs allemands," said Daniel Cohn-Bendit in May 1968, or not exactly. He was Jewish himself by birth and German by choice. His parents were German Jews who had fled to France in 1933, and he was born stateless in 1945; after his family moved back to Germany in 1958, already a radical, he opted for German citizenship, specifically to avoid the military service demanded of young French men, but he wound up in France anyway, in 1966, as a sociology student at the working-class university of Nanterre in the northern Paris banlieues.