Although a “natural-born” American citizen, I spent a good deal of my early life in France and, like Veronique de Rugy, I too grew up with the bracing iconoclasm of Charlie Hebdo.

I’ve heard Charlie Hebdo (since acquiring its sudden tragic notoriety) described by Americans as “a kind of French Mad magazine, only more political.” Well, that’s close, but not quite it. I’d say rather that Charlie Hebdo (and its forebear, about which more below) was more a kind of French/Left version of our own South Park phenomenon and that the team of editors and cartoonists who were gunned down by those practitioners of the Religion of Peace were their Trey Parkers and Matt Stones. With perhaps Bill Maher thrown in there (the Bill Maher who recently took on Ben Affleck). Above all, those insouciant intellectual warriors of Charlie Hebdo were in the best tradition of the Orwellian “Left” — i.e., anti-totalitarian in all its manifestations, including (extremely rare for the Left) definitely Communism.

Actually, the paper we all suddenly now know was a weekly (hebdo-madaire) offshoot of an earlier, monthly humor and satire magazine called “Hara-Kiri” (which proudly called itself “Journal Bête et Méchant,” “a stupid and nasty journal,” which gives you an idea of its animating zeitgeist), a full-color splendor that flourished in France from 1960 to 1970.

And Hara-Kiri ’s particular béte noir was religion: Rapacious popes and Jews who could have come out of Der Stürmer joined rag-headed Muslim imams as ecumenical objects of derision, along with contemporary politicos and a profusion of mostly undraped célébritées. Everyone was fair game.

Personally, my favorite French magazine even managed to figure in a bizarre — even surreal — little episode while I was serving in Vietnam. When I was over there as a first lieutenant in U.S. Army intelligence during 1968–69, my parents were still living in Paris. And, somehow, in 1969 my mother got to know General Vernon Walters, who was then leading the U.S. side at the Vietnam “Paris Peace Talks.”

As both my mother and General Walters were accomplished linguists and they both shared the same fervent anti-Communism, they hit it off famously. When she told him, “Oh, one of my sons is in Vietnam right now,” Walters was gracious — and foolhardy — enough to offer, “Oh, really? Gee. Well, if you have anything you’d like to send him, I’ll see that he gets it.” Poor guy, he was probably thinking my Mom might give him some cookies (or, it being Paris, some éclairs) for me, but no — my mother went and collected some recent issues of Hara-Kiri, put them in an envelope, and gave them to General Walters with my name and Army address on it.

Holy cow. You meant well, Mom, although it was not the smartest of moves. Because shortly thereafter I was peremptorily interrupted while in the middle of a rather sensitive and very secret mission, on behalf of General Abrams himself, to the French-Vietnamese Catholic community, and ordered to report PDQ to the office of a then-unknown (certainly to me) staff officer at the headquarters of Military Assistance Command (Vietnam) in Saigon, one Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Haig. Who, looking as though he had just stepped in about five pounds of dog doodoo, scowlingly said to me, “Lieutenant, I don’t know who the hell you are, or who the hell you know, but . . . I’ve been instructed to give you this filthy pornography, God knows why, and God knows what the hell it is, but . . . I doan’ wanna know — here it is — take it, and get the hell outta here!”

Utterly flummoxed and not a little terrified, I took the envelope, saluted, and, as bidden, promptly de-assed the area. Only safely outside did I open the offending parcel, to find, to my goggle-eyed disbelief, the issues of Hara-Kiri. Forty-six years later, as I type this now, I’m still shaking my head at my dear departed Mater . . .

Anyway, back in the French métropole, Hara-Kiri had a high old time of it throughout the ’60s, pretty much alone in its niche (it was never to be compared with the supposedly iconoclastic but in truth orthodox leftist and surprisingly pedantic Le Canard Enchainé) until finally, in 1970, it pushed the stern Gallic envelope too far, publishing some obscene enormity on the occasion of the death of General de Gaulle, and President Pompidou had Hara-Kiri magazine shut down. Fermé.

But somehow its weekly little offshoot Charlie Hebdo slipped through the censor’s bureaucratic cracks and continued to publish — somewhat circumspectly at first, but eventually regaining its former turbulent panache.

As I say, although technically left of center, it was, above all else, a devastator of every form of political correctness:

For example, one of its covers I particularly cherished was in 1979, when Red China and recently triumphant Vietnam fought a short but vicious and bloody border war. The Charlie Hebdo cover in question had two absurdly and offensively stereotypical slant-eyed, buck-toothed yellow Asian cartoon figures, one in a Mao hat and the other in an North Vietnamese Army pith helmet, rolling around in the dirt, scratching and kicking and gouging. The caption read, “Allez Le Jaunes!” (“Go at it, you yellows!”). For a long time I had that cover framed and hung on my wall, although it was replaced a few years ago by one of those currently reviled ones of the Prophet You-Know-Who.

In recent years, of course, the chief enemy of liberty and of the freedoms of both speech and religion has been Islamism, in France as elsewhere, and so it was in that direction that Charlie Hebdo fearlessly trained a lot of its satirical fire.

For which the poor devils have now paid with their lives.

Well, as I write, this episode may, at least in Europe, prove to be one horror too far. Many thousands of anti-Islamists are said to be finally bestirring their sedentary rumps and declaring, in various languages, that enough is, enfin, enough. (Well, espérons, anyway.)

— Jack Jolis is an American businessman and was an Army officer in Vietnam.