“That bullet didn’t miss me, but it didn’t get me,” wanted to believe Simon Fieschi at the bar of the Assize Court, on September 9, 2020. When he came forward to testify, his bruised body gave way a little, but the webmaster of Charlie Hebdo had refused the chair that was offered to him. “I want to testify standing up.” In the editorial office of the satirical newspaper, his office was the first one you came across when you opened the door. He will be the first one the Kouachi brothers will shoot at when they arrive.
The Kalashnikov bullet which passed through his body on January 7, 2015, entering at the level of the neck, perforating his lung, touching his spinal cord and exiting at the level of the left shoulder blade, did not miss him. She ended up getting it too. Almost ten years later, the killing of Charlie Hebdo made a new victim: Simon Fieschi killed himself on the night of October 17 to 18. He was 40 years old.
“Middle finger”
Simon Fieschi lost 7 centimeters on January 7. And the use of his legs and hands. Evacuated to Pitié-Salpêtrière, he was plunged into an artificial coma for a week. “So, I discovered the attack of January 7 a week later, on January 14.” It’s his mother who tells him when he wakes up: the killing, the hunt for the Kouachi brothers, the Hyper Hide, the January 11 march. “It took me several hours to understand. Then I couldn’t remember who was alive or dead. And I had a feeling of absurd embarrassment, I didn’t dare ask anymore.” The physical pain is so intense that it takes up all the space. “She has the good thing that she keeps psychological problems at bay.” So much so, he says, that “the sadness, the anger, these emotions arrived much later”. Once the state of astonishment is overcome.
He will remain at Les Invalides for eight months, slowly coming back to life. Gradually learning to walk again, resigning himself to no longer being able to tie his shoelaces alone. “I lost the opposition in my thumb. It seems stupid, but I can’t give the middle finger anymore, sometimes it itch,” he will describe during the trial.
Simon Fieschi recounted his slow progress in Charliein October 2020. In a long, chilling story, accompanied by drawings by Riss, he unvarnishedly recounted the torture of his weeks in hospital – “I discovered the sensation of a broken bone, of wounded flesh, of a nerve that screams. The pain of being poorly installed, which starts as a slight discomfort and becomes unbearable after a few hours” – and the paranoia that gradually invades him – “I was convinced that I stank horribly and that no one could get near me without vomiting or passing out, or that I was a guinea pig being kept alive for terrible experiments”.
“It’s a full-time job being an attack victim.”
— Simon Fieschi
If cartoonists and journalists were able to deliver their catharsis to drawing and writing, Simon Fieschi invested himself in administration, leading the fight for compensation, becoming a specialist in personal injury law. With this question: “How much is what happened to you worth?” he explained on France Inter, how much the pain is worth, the outlook of others which has changed and “the feeling of having become an alien”: “It’s a full-time job to be a victim of an attack.”
His job was webmaster: in 2015, he was in charge of the site and social networks of Charlie. Before that, explains the little biography that accompanies his articles in the newspaper, “he had tried to become a policeman out of teenage rebellion, to piss off a communist father and a sixty-eighter”. He loved Keith Jarrett, Gaston Lagaffe and Cioran. He was also a staff representative. His cats were called Dupond and Dupont.
“Animal reaction”
Eighteen months before the attack, he had met Maisie, a young Australian who worked in France. After the attack, Anne Hidalgo married them at the town hall of the 11th arrondissement. This is undoubtedly why this father of a little girl agreed to meet an Australian journalist a few days ago, to whom he had confided that he was finally able to receive his disability pension. “without too much guilt”admitting to having sometimes wondered what he could do with his life without being a «parasite» for society. So he walked around the classrooms, talking about terrorism with students who were sometimes unaware of the subject, recalling that today’s middle school students were just infants on January 7, 2015, that they had the right to ignore and that we had a duty to teach them.
In the story he wrote in 2020, Simon Fieschi confided the darkest thoughts that had haunted him in his hospital room. “I thought a lot in this bed and realized that dying was my only solution. But how? Impossible to commit suicide, paralyzed on an intensive care bed and under constant medical supervision. Being forced to live seemed to me an intolerable negation of my freedom. I concluded that to regain this freedom, I had to bide my time, observe and get better to finally have the opportunity to kill myself.” Further on, however, he writes: “Despite my conscious desire to stop living, I will always remember my animal, instinctive reaction to rear up with all my being against death.” The dizziness we feel when reading these lines, four years after their publication, almost ten years after the attack, is there to remind us that wounds, whatever the weather, never close.
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