PHOTOGRAPY BY MARC PIASECKI/GETTY

In 2011, just six days after the Paris office of Charlie Hebdo, a French satirical magazine under threat for having run cartoons of the prophet Mohammed, was gutted by a fire bomb, the staff put out a new issue with a cover drawing of a bearded, presumably Muslim man kissing a cartoonist. The caption was “L’amour: Plus fort que la haine,” which translates to “Love: Stronger than hate.” The cartoon was a properly irreverent combination—an affirmation of the most universal truth, a commitment to the magazine's own very particular identity. To be brave, one needn't ever be saccharine. The magazine and its artists, editors, and staff believed in all of that and lived those values, in a way that few of us are ever asked to. At midday this Wednesday, ten of them were killed, along with two Paris policemen who rushed to their aid when what were reportedly two or three hooded men, armed with AK-47s—some of the details are not yet clear—went into the office, in Paris's Eleventh Arrondissement, and started firing, apparently at anyone they could find. In addition to the dead, twenty people were injured, according to French police statements. There is a video in which the gunmen can be heard shouting “Allahu Akbar!”—God is great. This was, as President François Hollande said after rushing to the scene, "undoubtedly an act of terrorism." And, though the exact identity of the shooters will need to be determined, in these first hours there are strong signs that it is an act of Islamist terrorism.

The dead include Stéphane Charbonnier, who used the pen name Charb and was the very brave editor of Charlie Hebdo; the cartoonists Jean Cabut (who signed his work Cabu), Bernard Verlhac (Tignous), Georges Wolinski, and Philippe Honoré; Mustapha Ourrad, a copy editor; the columnists Bernard Maris and Elsa Cayat; Frédéric Boisseau, described as a building maintenance worker. Ahmed Merabet and Franck Brinsolaro were police officers. Michel Renaud was visiting the office when he was shot dead. (Vox has a list.) They were assassinated. The gunmen were not on a suicide mission; they fled and stole a car, which the latest reports suggest has been located in the Twentieth Arrondissement. (The Guardian and others have live updates; these include video clips of a shoot-out.) The gunmen were still at large in Paris, as of the early afternoon there, and presumably armed. Children were evacuated from schools near the Charlie Hebdo office, which was in the same building as at least one other media organization. Some workers in the building managed to hide from the shooters, but it was, reportedly, a production day at the magazine, busy and crowded. This was an attack on a publication and a neighborhood, a country and its press, and on any journalist, in any city. The magazine made fun of people—of many faiths, for many follies, which we all need to be reminded that we have. Some of the cartoons were blatantly, roughly sexual, and not designed to endear them to Jews or Christians. Satire was Charlie Hebdo’s mission, and a necessary one. There were times when the French government asked the magazine to hold back, but the magazine kept being itself, which is what one wishes for in a free press. Wednesday's crime should not cause anyone to second-guess Charlie Hebdo’s editorial decisions. Silence is not where the answers to an incident like this lie.

Recently, the magazine had mocked the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS. The last tweet on the magazine’s account before news of the attack was of a cartoon of the group’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. As the BBC noted, there are questions about its exact timing and provenance. But making fun of al-Baghdadi is not recklessness; it’s how one knows that ISIS has not won, and never will. There ought to be more tweets that do so.* (Whether ISIS in particular had a role in this attack is a question that can't be answered at this stage; its members are, sadly, not the only ones in the terrorism business.) The current issue of Charlie Hebdo, published the day of the shooting, featured a caricature of the novelist Michel Houellebecq on the cover. Houellebecq’s new novel, "Submission," also out Wednesday, according to the Times, "predicts a future France run by Muslims, in which women forsake Western dress and polygamy is introduced." The drawing of Houellebecq, accompanied by a joke about Ramadan, is not flattering. The French police have added the protection of Houellebecq to their list of priorities on what is, by all accounts, a traumatic and disorienting day for the entire country. He deserves safety, and not chastisement. Barack Obama, David Cameron, and Angela Merkel have all quickly condemned the attack and the wider assault on the press. The rector of Paris's Grand Mosque added his voice, saying, according to the Times, “We are horrified. … Our community is stunned by what just happened. It’s a whole section of our democracy that is seriously affected."

France, it will be said in the next days, has failed, in a profound way, when it comes to making sense of its own diversity. What will be strongly debated is the nature of that failure, and what its opposite might look like. Marine Le Pen, the leader of the National Front, will, inevitably, offer one set of answers, with her characteristic, glossy coat on her much uglier injunctions that often add up to the same thing. Who in France, and in other countries, whose policies and commitment to a free press were, again, targeted in the attack on Charlie Hebdo, is going to come forward with other, better answers? This is a dangerous moment for France, both in the frighteningly immediate sense—there are armed terrorists loose in the capital—and because the decisions that a nation makes at a time of terror are not always the best ones, for anybody. “L’amour: Plus fort que la haine,” as Charlie Hebdo put it years ago—and what makes that line meaningful, and not some trite filler of empty air in a shot-up office—is remembering who you are.

*Clarification: The reference to the tweet has been revised to reflect questions about it.