jesuischarlieIn the months following the massacre on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, the struggling publication has become flush with €30m in gifts, subscriptions and unprecedented sales.

However, not all of the surviving staff are celebrating the proverbial rise of the phoenix from the ashes.  In fact, according to some of the survivors, this barrage of wealth and fame threatens the very spirit of the irreverent, hard-left, anti-religious magazine.  Fifteen of the surviving staff have written an article in Le Monde warning that Charlie Hebdo risks losing its identity to the “poison of the millions”.

According to Britain’s The Independent, “the article is the most aggressive and most public act so far in an increasingly vitriolic quarrel between some of the magazine’s staff and its management and owners. The 15 dissidents say Charlie Hebdo has become a ‘worldwide’ symbol of resistance to  ‘intolerance’ since the Kouachi brothers murdered 11 cartoonists, journalists, editors, visitors and a police bodyguard in protest against the publication of cartoons depicting the Prophet on 7 January. They say the magazine’s new wealth has also made it into a “tempting prey” for financiers and lawyers.”

Stipulating that their outcry is anything but a crass money grab, the staff wants to convert Charlie Hebdo into a self-governing “co-operative” and recognized as a “public property” with the millions in euros to be held trust to guarantee the magazine’s survival for “30 years”.

However, a legal spokesman for the magazine’s management and its shareholders opined that indeed the motive of the staff members is to control and profit from the wealth in short order before the dust has settled. In fact, one of the magazine’s cartoonist-editor Riss, who owns a 40 per cent stake, is still recovering from his injuries from three months ago. Another block of shares has been bequeathed to the family of former editor Stéphane Charbonnier (Charb). Consequently, noted the unidentified legal spokesperson, it is too early to address the ownership structure of the magazine.

Before the massacre at its Paris office, Charlie Hebdo had a weekly circulation of 30,000 and was contending with serious debt. Its first post-massacre edition in late January sold seven million copies worldwide. Annual pre-paid subscriptions in France alone have now topped 200,000.