Charlie Hebdo celebrates its missing in a poignant book

As the 10th anniversary of the Islamist attack that decimated its editorial team approaches, “Charlie Hebdo” pays tribute to its “disappeared” in a poignant book, intended to “make the terrorists lie” who rejoiced, on January 7, 2015, for having “killed” the newspaper.

Twelve people lost their lives in the attack by the Kouachi brothers on the satirical weekly, a target of jihadist threats since the publication of caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed in 2006.

Among them, eight members of the editorial staff: the designers Cabu, Charb, Honoré, Tignous and Wolinski, the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Elsa Cayat, the economist Bernard Maris and the proofreader Mustapha Ourrad.

Expected on December 5 from Les Echappés, “Charlie Liberté, the diary of their life” celebrates their work through a selection of drawings, texts and testimonies on more than 200 pages.

The latest are also dedicated to the former webmaster of the weekly, Simon Fieschi, seriously injured in 2015 and died in October at the age of 40, a week before the book went to print…

“The idea was to talk about the missing”, about “what they also did before being at Charlie” and “how” they got there, Gérard Biard, the editor-in-chief of the newspaper.

To “continue, in some way, to keep them alive and to make lie to the two terrorists who, after committing their massacre, left the editorial office” shouting “We killed Charlie Hebdo!”, continues the journalist.

“They did not kill Charlie Hebdo”, which sells 50,000 copies each week, according to Gérard Biard.

As for the missing, “they are not dead either”, their work having “not aged a bit”, he argues.

In addition to their creations for the weekly with corrosive humor – from Maurice and Patapon, Charb’s anti-capitalist dog and cat, to Elsa Cayat’s “Charlie Divan” column – the book returns to the first sketches of Cabu, winner at 19 years old from a competition for a brand of pens, Honoré’s fascination with animals or Mustapha Ourrad’s love of the French language…

It’s about giving the reader the “want to be free as they were,” explains Riss, the director of “Charlie,” in the book’s introduction.

“We don’t create Charlie Hebdo by chance,” underlines Mr. Biard, recalling that François Cavanna and Professor Choron founded it in 1970 to “write and read there what they could not read elsewhere” and circumvent the censorship of the Gaullist power targeting their magazine “Hara Kiri”.

“Charlie Liberté” thus inaugurates the commemorations of ten years of the January 2015 attacks against the newspaper, a Montrouge police officer and the Hyper Cacher, which left 17 dead.

The weekly will also release a special 32-page issue in January, including the best drawings from the international caricature competition #RiredeDieu which it launched until mid-December to denounce “the influence of all religions” on freedoms. .

He will also retrace the excitement around the caricatures of Mohammed, at the origin of violent demonstrations in Muslim countries, initially published in 2005 by the Danish daily “Jyllands-Posten” and taken up by the weekly in 2006.

“Charlie Hebdo” had republished these drawings in 2020, “evidence” on the eve of the opening of the trial for the January 2015 attacks, as well as the cover designed in 2006 by Cabu, “deliberately misunderstood” by his detractors , according to Mr. Biard.

This front page, in which Mahomet “overwhelmed by fundamentalists” judges that “it’s hard to be loved by idiots”, appears in “Charlie Liberté”.

In 2015, a week after the killing, the newspaper depicted the prophet holding a sign “Je suis Charlie”, under the headline “All is forgiven”.

Has Charlie been self-censoring since then? “We never made a drawing simply because it amused us (…) Today, to criticize, to talk about what Islamist ideology is, there is no longer any need to draw Mohammed. Everyone understood that Mohammed was a pretext” for terrorists, assures Gérard Biard.