If money lies at the heart of discourse in the United States, and sex is taboo, in France it is the opposite. “Pour vivre heureux, vivons cachés,” goes an old adage, or “To live happy, live hidden.” Money is a reviled non-subject. It is never to be flaunted, preferably not talked about—unlike sex, frequently mentioned because nobody cares. “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” was the revolution’s slogan. The words came in the wrong order. In practice, egalitarianism has almost always held sway over freedom, at least of markets, in the French soul. President François Hollande, who has since changed his tune, propelled himself to the Élysée Palace by declaring, “My principal adversary has no name. It has no face and does not belong to a political party. It has never presented its candidature and has never been elected, but it still governs. This adversary is the world of finance.”

For Charlie Hebdo, the small satirical weekly transformed into a global symbol of freedom of expression by the slaughter early this year of its staff, money has also been an adversary, an idea that sat uneasily with its history and causes. P&L, for Charlie Hebdo, was always more about peace and love than profit and loss. Born (under another name) in the heady communal spirit of the 1960s, it carries in its DNA the heritance of an anarchist left hostile to the perceived ravages of capitalism.

This attitude long sat comfortably enough because Charlie has more often been poor than rich. No more: as Gérard Biard, the new editor in chief, remarked in his first editorial after two jihadist killers, the Kouachi brothers, murdered a dozen people at the paper on January 7 to avenge the caricatured Prophet Muhammad, “For a week now, Charlie, an atheist paper, has accomplished more miracles than all the saints and prophets together.” Foremost among those miracles is newfound wealth.

In the space of a few months, a publication with a storied past but uncertain future, beset by dwindling revenues and readership, casting around for financial support, has been transformed into a cash cow. People who had scarcely heard of the paper now flaunt the ubiquitous “Je suis Charlie” badge. The post-massacre edition, No. 1178, sold some eight million copies, an increase of more than 13,000 percent over previous levels. Subscriptions have soared to more than 200,000 from about 10,000. Donations have multiplied, from Google, the French government, and sympathizers across the world. One Web site garnered close to $2 million through the contributions of 24,500 individuals. As a result, Charlie Hebdo, irreverent mocker of all forms of power, reportedly finds itself sitting on more than $33 million in cash, a once unthinkable sum. (The owners have put the figure lower, at roughly $18 million, from sales and donations.)

Blood and Money

This is a ticklish development. A Catholic country that for decades after the war had one of the West’s largest Communist Parties, France tends to find money dirty. It is associated with guilt. It is something for which it is best to excuse oneself. There have been great French liberals—Montesquieu, Tocqueville, and Raymond Aron among them—but the word “liberal” tends to conjure up the specter of Anglo-Saxon neoliberal capitalism, against which the Gallic world of solidarity must form a bulwark. As Jacques Rupnik, a prominent political scientist, remarked to me, alluding to Max Weber’s classic study on Protestantism, “Nobody has ever written a book called The Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.” He laughed. “And now here’s Charlie, with its inherited hatred of money, suddenly sitting on 30 million euros in the bank.”

More than a million people gather for a rally in Paris on Sunday, January 11, 2015, following the attack on Charlie Hebdo, four days earlier. By Nigel Dickinson/Polaris.

It is of course easier to take a detached or critical view of money when one does not have any. With millions have come machinations. Charlie Hebdo is now 40 percent owned by the parents of the paper’s murdered editorial director and cartoonist, Stéphane Charbonnier, or “Charb.” Laurent Sourisseau, the writer and cartoonist known as “Riss,” owns another 40 percent. Eric Portheault, the finance director, owns the rest. Their shares, once worth little or nothing, are suddenly worth a lot.