Braving the freezing cold, several hundred people gathered in New York and Washington on Wednesday to denounce the attack on Charlie Hebdo and defend the freedom of the press.
In Washington, among the 300 or so demonstrators was Christine Lagarde, the patron of the IMF, who came to show her solidarity with (her) compatriots and her sympathy for the victims ”.
“We are all still in shock,” she said, referring to these “cartoonists who have accompanied our daily lives for years. Me, I was caricatured by Cabu and I smiled at the time ”.
This attack is “both the symbol of the attack in the heart of Paris and the questioning of freedom of expression,” she added.
The demonstration in front of the Newseum, a museum devoted to the press in the American capital, was organized by an expatriate Frenchman, Olivier Roumy, who “lived through the attacks of September 11 in the United States, today we have lived on the 11th. -French September, ”he told AFP.
Before the names of the victims were read, Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, claimed that, Jews, Christians or Muslims, “(were) all united against tyranny”.
In New York, despite a felt temperature of -20 degrees Celsius, several hundred people, overwhelmingly French, sang the Marseillaise before chanting “Charlie, Charlie” on Union Square.
The French Ambassador to the UN François Delattre and the French Consul in New York Bertrand Lortholary were present.
“How not to cry,” said Pacale Padiou, a French woman who came with her 16-year-old son and her husband, in tears. “We no longer have the right to express ourselves? Are we going to get shot? “
“I am a journalist, I am the generation Charlie, we are all Charlie“, Explained Mylène Massé, 28 years upset. “It’s horrible. But they did not succeed. They put the whole of France on its feet ”.
“I did not believe that in a month, I was going to demonstrate for the life of black people (after the Garner affair in New York editor’s note) and now for Charlie», Commented Caroline Mezière who works in finance. “Even far away we are French, we are proud of Charlie».
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