After the horror and sadness, the first response is one of admiration. Faced with a threat to their republican values – liberty, equality, fraternity – the people of France take to the streets in huge numbers, holding up pens in honour of the murdered journalists of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, who included some of the nation’s best-known cartoonists.

“Je suis Charlie,” they cry, in an ancient gesture of solidarity; although in truth, few of us anywhere would be either as insouciant as the Charlie journalists were in insulting all and sundry, often in outrageously stereotyped terms, or as brave as they were in continuing to do so after specific death threats, and an actual firebomb attack on their office.

» Read on