On January 16, 2015, hundreds of people gathered in the northern Paris suburb of Pontoise to pay their respects to Charb. Nine days earlier, the cartoonist was gunned down in the small editorial office of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, in Paris, alongside 11 of his colleagues, all of whom died under the Kalashnikov bullets of the Kouachi brothers.

After the initial shock, it was time for sadness and remembrance. On January 16, in a thick silence, Jean-Luc Mélenchon delivered his friend's eulogy in a distraught voice. "Charb, you have been murdered by our oldest, cruelest, most constant and most narrow-minded enemies, the religious fanatics, the bloody cretins who have always been vociferating," he said, in front of the coffin, referring to the "mocked secularism" and "mocked secularists" that Charb defended. "Thank you, comrade," he said, crying.

A few days before, on January 11, Mélenchon had taken part in the great Republican march, alongside the whole of the French political world and a host of foreign heads of state, adding his sorrow to that expressed by a tide of anonymous people who took to the streets in support of "Charlie". A few misgivings were expressed among the intellectual left, but they went unnoticed. It was time for national unity and republican communion.

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