France | Charlie Hebdo celebrates its missing in a book, almost 10 years after the attack

(Paris) Approaching the 10^e anniversary of the Islamist attack that decimated its editorial staff, the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo pays tribute to its “disappeared” in a poignant book, intended to “make the terrorists lie” who rejoiced, on January 7, 2015, at having “killed” the newspaper.

Twelve people lost their lives in the attack carried out by the Kouachi brothers against 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 editions, Charlie Liberté, the diary of their life celebrates their work through a selection of drawings, texts and testimonies on more than 200 pages.

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

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

“We don’t do 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 to circumvent the censorship of the Gaullist power targeting their magazine Skin Crime.

Charlie Liberty thus inaugurates the commemorations of the 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 Liberty.

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