I spent entire nights asking myself that question. When I finally fell asleep, the nightmares returned, carrying me into the darkness, a place from which I had the impression I would never escape. I would wake up with a start, thinking that I really needed to talk to Georges about it.
Those last months, we had never spoken about the threats against Charlie Hebdo.
“Darling, I’m going to Charlie.” From now on, I will have to understand alone why, a few days after he said those words to me, I found myself at the morgue to identify his body. In the room in the mortuary where a psychologist greets you with a smile, I waited for them to prepare his remains. The night before the appointment, I had dreamed that, as in the movies, they would open a drawer that my husband was in. I woke up in such terror that I didn’t think I would go.
The psychologist first led me behind a pane of glass. On the other side, Georges’s body was resting on a rather high stand. A large white sheet covered his body. Only his face was visible. Not for a second did I think about what was under that sheet: a body shot through by bullets from a Kalashnikov. I was simply sorry I couldn’t see his hands, couldn’t take them in mine. I thought he looked good, handsome, and I recognized the irony in his smile. Not for a second did I imagine they had put makeup on him to cover the contusions; like the other cartoonists, he’d fallen facedown onto the ground. Once next to him, I stroked his face, then his lips, then I kissed him. He looked twenty years younger. I didn’t want to ever leave him. I felt calm, next to him.
When I arrived, the psychologist said that she had rarely seen a dead person with such a serene face. “I didn’t know Monsieur Wolinski,” she added, “because I don’t read the papers or watch television, but when I saw him, I was surprised by the tranquility I could read on his face.” Listening to this person, full of sweetness and compassion, I imagined that Georges must not have suffered. That he fell after being shot without really understanding what was happening to him. And that was so like him.
* * *
I continued stroking his cheek and kissing him, as if he were taking a nap on the living room sofa. As soon as he’d finished a cartoon, he would happily stretch out, holding Le Monde, and fall asleep. Not that he was bored reading Le Monde, but as soon as he closed his eyes, he fell asleep. Lucky or unlucky? He spent many hours sleeping, in order to be rejuvenated, he would say, to have several days all in one day. And several lives in his one life. In the morgue, I wanted to take a picture of him, to keep this final image of him forever. The psychologist advised against it. Feeling so emotional, I didn’t ask her why. Today I regret it. That picture may have saved me some time.
The young psychologist soon made me aware that I had to go. Families of the other victims were waiting outside. I looked at Georges one last time. It was no longer the Georges I had held; it was Georges’s body.
The same idea occurred to me the morning he was placed in the coffin. I kissed him once again, fully aware that his lips were not the same as the ones Georges had used to kiss me when we’d gotten married forty-seven years earlier at the town hall in Canapville. Afterward, he had taken me to a field where we had made love all afternoon before falling asleep beneath the stars. You couldn’t imagine a more wonderful wedding night. It was his gift to me. Then, left-winger that he was, he took me on a long trek through the countries of the Eastern Bloc. We met with bitter illustrators who envied his great freedom. He introduced me to them as his “blond little girl.”
For a long time, he wanted me to remain that innocent woman who, like a doll, gave in to his least desire. But the doll was hatching a feminist, rebellious by nature. Later on, when we felt nostalgia for our youth, he would return to the blond little girl he’d met in the editorial office of the Journal du Dimanche, and he’d tell me he missed the days when he could “play” with me. Beneath the feminist left-winger lay an eternal male chauvinist.
But on January 7, the blond little girl disappeared amid the rubble of the massacre.
11
GETTING UP EVERY morning is difficult. I feel like a soldier who must hurry to be at the appointed place for the next battle. Which battle? I don’t know. But almost every day, some opportunity presents itself. And the soldier must respond to the duty calling her and find the strength to act once more.
But I don’t really have any strength. And in the end, I wind up inventing my battles. I make appointment after appointment to fill the endless desert of my days. I spend more time on the phone than I should. I put the radio on very loud because I want someone to talk to me. I listen to writers; first Annie Ernaux, then, later on, Simone de Beauvoir. I have the impression they are speaking to me and not to the journalist who is interviewing them. In the evening, I accept invitations, to avoid being alone as the day ends, sitting in front of a meal that I can’t manage to finish. Then comes the time to go to bed, the decisive moment. I take more tranquilizers to try to avoid nightmares, but still they wake me up with a start, so I spend my sleepless nights going through thousands of photos of Georges. I have the impression of being engulfed in a war that has become internalized. The goal of the terrorists who murdered Georges and his friends was to spread terror. I would like to contribute to fighting against terror, but it remains deeply rooted within me. This is what is really at stake: to rid yourself of terror. And so I continue my quest, try to understand, to explain. Is someone, somewhere, guilty? I question, listen, read.
In the past, Georges used to mock me, saying, “You always look for someone who is guilty, in everything.” He was right. But the generalized “clear conscience” that followed the attack did not satisfy me. Where could I get answers to my questions? From the police? At Charlie Hebdo? And how would I rebuild my own life? By murdering Georges, the terrorists tore out a part of me. Before being able to reconstruct my life, I had to reclaim that part of myself.
So, the police?
In April 2013, two years after the fire in the Charlie Hebdo offices, the major police union, Alliance Police Nationale, had already pressured the government to cut down the surveillance of Charlie Hebdo. How could they dedicate so many resources to protecting a newspaper that spit on everything and everyone, starting with the police force? Members of the union had distributed leaflets revealing that on April 4, during a meeting with the director of the DOPC, the agency responsible for maintaining public order, representatives from the union had “demanded the immediate cessation of the Charlie Hebdo assignment.” For more than seven months, they complained, “the DOPC task force had been providing as many as nine officers a day to protect the private offices of a newspaper.” To the union, the police were not “security guards.” They were responsible, above all, to carry out state assignments. In the same leaflet, they continued: “Is the DOPC so rich in numbers that it can afford this luxury?” Whatever the case may be, their numbers were clearly insufficient given the situation.
To the union, providing surveillance for Charlie Hebdo, whose offices had just been destroyed by a firebomb and which continually received threats, was a luxury during this period of shortage of police officers on the ground. Did the authorities finally give in to the pressure? In July 2014, Jean-Jacques Urvoas, the president of the Senate Judicial Committee, pointed out during a session of the Assemblée nationale that antiterrorist specialists periodically warned of an imminent threat.I On October 1, 2014, when Charlie Hebdo was already in its new offices on rue Nicolas-Appert, after publishing an issue that once again had a cover showing a caricature of the Prophet Mohammed, the director of the prefect of police, Laurent Nuñez, reinstated the “static” protection: a police van and officers who would do shifts at the front door of the building. A little while later, moreover, he explained in Le Monde, “the illustrator, Charb, would call us when he was publishing a risky issue and we reinstated the static protection.”
But under union pressure, police officials removed that regular protection a few days later and replaced it with a type of surveillance called “active”: patrols that went by the
offices almost every thirty minutes. And yet, according to police sources, the threats against Charb continued to intensify, which Angélique, the newspaper’s receptionist, confirmed—and which was contrary to what Gérard Biard, one of the newspaper’s contributors, stated when the attack took place, saying that “the threats had seemed less serious.”
Gérard Biard and Angélique must not have spoken to each other, or perhaps the newspaper’s contributors preferred to turn a blind eye. “We didn’t want to live in a bunker,” Patrick Pelloux stated after the attack. But now that ten of their colleagues have been murdered, they are actually forced to work in a place with intense security, with, for some of them, police protection twenty-four hours a day.
Measures taken too late. Especially given that Loïc Garnier, the director of the antiterrorist coordination unit, stated in September 2014, three months before the attack—as had Jean-Jacques Urvoas in the Assemblée nationale—that “the question was no longer if there would be an attack in France, but when.” And Franck Brinsolaro, Charb’s bodyguard, who was experienced in dangerous situations after having taken on numerous missions that were particularly perilous, notably in Afghanistan, confided to his wife that “he could sense a catastrophe was about to happen.” So danger truly was present.
It is unimaginable that Franck Brinsolaro, who didn’t even have time to draw his weapon on the day of the attack, did not pass on his fears to his superiors. But there was a negative atmosphere in the Protection Unit he belonged to. During 2014, the press echoed this, after the suicide of two police officers, one of whom had been in charge of security for Bernadette Chirac. The officers in the Protection Service certainly were filled with discontent because their workload was becoming heavier and heavier. According to union representatives, this was due to a growing number of protections dubbed “bogus protections,” which had often been arranged without the prior agreement of the antiterrorist unit, which was a procedural prerequisite. This way of doing things had been denounced in the press. Think of the Saudi prince who had asked for, and received, protection to go shopping on the French Riviera . . .
This is why the police surveillance van had disappeared in front of the building at 10, rue Nicolas-Appert, providing an unusual window of opportunity for the terrorists to attack. According to a police source, the minister of the interior, when questioned, is said to have replied that surveillance of that type would have caused even more deaths. Why? Because of the lack of training of the police force, apart from the antiterrorist unit, the GIGN, and the BRI.II Everyone confirms this and complains about it. They feel powerless in the face of terrorists and their heavy weaponry. Armed with their SIG Sauger semiautomatics, they don’t think they have a chance against the Kalashnikovs the jihadists use. And the jihadists, as we saw only too well during the January 7 attack, act in greater cold blood, because they have been excellently trained for months—in Yemen or elsewhere.
Only three days a year are dedicated to training a French police officer in the use of firearms—insufficient to turn them into crack snipers, fighters who could measure up to the challenge posed by jihadists. And another major problem is their bulletproof vests: the most effective one weighs twenty-two pounds! So many police officers wear a lighter one—which is totally useless against rounds from a Kalashnikov. And yet those were the vests that the bicycle patrolmen who first got the message saying shots had been heard in Charlie Hebdo’s building were wearing (even if they were unaware, remember, that Charlie Hebdo was in their area). The Kouachi brothers, on the other hand, wore heavier bulletproof vests, as can be seen in the videos.
As for the vehicles, many are inadequate. It was said that four million of them would be renovated throughout 2015. According to police sources, more than ten thousand had to be sent to the junkyard. A recent Alliance Police Nationale leaflet carried the headline “Police equals national monument in danger!”III In a drawing, a French policeman crumbles opposite a jihadist wearing a balaclava and brandishing a Kalashnikov.
What conclusion can we draw from all this? Today, despite the threats, ordinary police officers, who are not part of the GIGN, the antiterrorist unit, or the BRI, are not in any state to respond to the terrorist threat. And they all know it. After asking many questions, I realized that the GIGN, the antiterrorist unit, and the BRI are not sent out in response to simple telephone calls. But in January 2015, their men were brought in two days after the Charlie Hebdo attack, when the terrorist brothers were holed up in a printing factory in Dammartin-en-Goële, north of Paris.
In the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo murders and the killings at the kosher supermarket, the French government decided to deploy ten thousand soldiers. Ten thousand men, a number unheard of since the Algerian War. Moreover, according to Le Monde, the Secretariat-General for National Defense and Security convinced the president of France to save 18,750 jobs out of the 34,000 that were supposed to be cut. In addition, discussions are going on to establish a system that would link the army, the police, and the gendarmerie.IV Is the fight against terrorism finally beginning to get organized?
* * *
I. The Assemblée nationale is the lower house of the French parliament.
II. The Brigade de recherche et d’intervention (BRI) is the French Research and Intervention Brigade.
III. This headline is a reference to a very popular French TV program from the 1960s with the same title, which looked at national historical buildings, monuments, etc., that were falling into disrepair. Volunteers were recruited to renovate the buildings, and the program showed the structures before and after.
IV. The gendarmerie is a branch of the army that polices a specific local area outside Paris. The police, the army, and the gendarmerie have traditionally not easily cooperated with each other.
12
THE FIRST TIME I thought about Georges dying was well before the year 2000. We were on vacation in Corsica, the island where Georges once told me that he wanted to be buried, facing the sea. We spent our time swimming together in the clear green waters of the Mediterranean. The first days, he swam quickly, strongly. I lagged behind, never able to catch up. One evening, after we’d gotten back to our hotel from a rather boozy dinner where he’d had several whiskeys and smoked a few cigars, I noticed that he was walking with difficulty. His face was drawn and pale.
The next day, we went back to the beach. I watched him dive in. I didn’t see him come up out of the water. Worried, I walked over to the shore and saw him swimming very slowly back to the beach. Once back on the beach, he complained about a terrible pain in his left arm. He was having trouble breathing. “It’s your heart,” I said. “We have to go to the ER.” “No, it’s muscular,” he claimed. “I must have hurt myself moving the beach umbrella the other night.”
In the days that followed, he didn’t swim; he just got in the water for a few minutes. I asked him why. Again the story about moving the beach umbrella. I arranged for us to go back to Paris early. He didn’t really object. But once in Paris, he made an appointment with his physical therapist and refused to allow me to contact a cardiologist.
I remember that I was crossing the place de l’Assemblée Nationale when I got the doctor’s call. Georges had been rushed to the hospital in Tenon. He’d had a heart attack. I hailed a taxi and went to the hospital. He was being taken care of by doctors and would be operated on the next day. I stayed with him, holding his hand and squeezing it tightly in mine and kissing him. The doctor who came in for his night shift was the only one who could make me leave Georges’s room. I had the feeling I would never see him alive again. That night, I had one nightmare after the other. One of them woke me with a start: I could see Georges disappearing into the distance as I tried in vain to catch up to him. What would become of me without him? I was no longer Georges’s wife who had been abandoned at the side of the road, but a little lost girl.
That image was still in my mind when I woke up. Until then, he had been a kind of Pygmalion to me—but a Pygm
alion who had also taught me how to liberate myself. What would happen to me if he died? How could I go on living without his gaze? When I got to the hospital the day of the operation, I thought again about how fragile Georges’s health was. But he would be unsinkable, I was convinced of that. Imagining his death was impossible for me.
Living without his gaze? The question has come back again and again since the attack. After the operation to give him stents, he came home feeling pretty well, and went to Charlie Hebdo the next day. This was still when Cavanna was respected, when his word counted for something. A time when Georges would become revitalized at Charlie, as he had at Paris Match, when Roger Thérond took over the magazine. When Philippe Val was running Charlie Hebdo, the climate changed: he claimed he would get its finances in order, proposing shares to new stockholders, which Georges didn’t take part in because he refused, he wanted to turn the newspaper into a true publishing business. All sorts of arguments and divisions followed.
In 2008, in one of the columns he was so good at writing, and as boldly as ever, Siné attacked President Sarkozy’s son Jean, who was about to marry the Jewish heiress Jessica Sebaoun-Darty.I In this type of matter, Siné pushed his freedom of expression—which was always borderline when it came to the Jews—to an extreme. Val, who was a friend of Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, immediately reacted by firing the cartoonist. The International League against Racism and Anti-Semitism (LICRA) filed a formal complaint against him, and various petitions followed, but a year later, Siné was nevertheless acquitted on the grounds of freedom of expression. He’d used his right to satirize. However, Val began to be seriously challenged. His “authoritarianism,” which some reproached him for, upset the team of talented and eccentric artists. During an editorial meeting, Riss, the owner of the newspaper since the attack, became unable to stand Val’s attitude, and grabbed his arm and prepared to throw him out a window. But Tignous rushed to save his friend. Such drama was not unusual at the heart of the editorial team. A few seconds later, everyone around the table was laughing again.
Darling, I'm Going to Charlie Page 6