That same year, following an article published in Le Monde, the team, whose members received a very modest salary, learned that two years before, the newspaper had recorded a profit of nearly a million euros. In fact, the first cover that showed the Prophet Mohammed, illustrated by Cabu and with the caption “It’s hard being loved by morons,” had attracted five hundred thousand readers. In a situation such as that, Choron, the former editor in chief, used to give everyone a raise in a festive atmosphere with the champagne flowing. But the current shareholders preferred sharing the booty of dividends among themselves, in total secrecy. The cartoonists and journalists had to be content with their meager salaries. In such matters, however, the secret always comes out. And the team had a huge fight. Then, a year later, Val became the director of France Inter, and left the already sinking ship.II To pay for the shares he was giving up, the paper’s owners found it necessary to sell the offices on the rue Étienne-Marcel that Charlie owned. That was the first departure. Val’s departure signaled the arrival of Charb, his “heir.” The newspaper became more political, trying to find its niche faced with competition by the Canard enchaîné, which had always been very successful.III But the readers didn’t follow. Not even the newspaper’s staunchest supporters, such as the radical left.
One Wednesday, a little while before the attack, after one of the editorial meetings, Georges came home from the newspaper looking somber and annoyed. He explained that Charb had lectured him to stop drawing cartoons that didn’t deal with current events. Current events meant, in particular, mocking the Prophet Mohammed and his followers, who were deemed dangerous, blinkered fanatics. Between the work he was doing for the Journal du Dimanche and Paris Match, Georges couldn’t take any more politics. To him, Charlie Hebdo represented exactly the kind of release he needed at the time, a place where he could draw what was funny to him, more often dealing with social rather than political issues. That was what the satirical weekly newspaper where he’d started out meant to him: a place where taboos could be broken. In May 1977, he wrote in one of his columns: “When I met the Hara-Kiri team, in the 1960s, politics was not discussed, as far as I remember. We shared only an extraordinary irreverence for institutions and taboos, which were numerous at the time. I have to say that, what with sex, religion, the army, advertising, work, family, and the country, there was plenty to satirize.” Back then, the religion he mocked was Catholicism, the religion of the pope and the Catholic fundamentalists, which was both his and Cabu’s favorite subject. People have forgotten that certain cartoons from the 1970s and ’80s put the pope in the same irreverent situations as the Prophet Mohammad of today’s cartoons. Sometimes there was a trial, but never a bomb.
In 2014, Charb’s Charlie Hebdo did not make fun of the same things as in the 1970s, but always in the name of freedom of expression and in defense of secularism, the paper did not hesitate to outdo everyone else. Delfeil de Ton, one of the very first friends of Hara-Kiri from 1967 onward, and thus one of Georges’s earliest colleagues, reported in the magazine L’Observateur that Georges once told him, “I think that we are reckless imbeciles who have taken a pointless risk. We think we are invulnerable. For dozens of years, we have been provoking, and one day that provocation will turn against us.”
Was that why, especially after Cavanna’s death, Georges went to the newspaper less often, apart from a few Wednesdays each month? Charb also reproached him for that. In the difficult situation in which Georges found himself, Charb’s thoughts were not well received. Georges was thinking about his professional future. He wanted to have more time to paint and write, while continuing to draw for the papers. That was the life he dreamed of at the time. Moreover, he had taken steps to get a studio where he would have more room to spread out his canvases and set up his easels. And he wouldn’t have enough time for that if he spent entire days at Charlie Hebdo filling the pages of a newspaper whose coffers were empty, a newspaper that he felt might have no future. He, on the other hand, wanted to prepare himself for what would follow. And he was determined to do so.
* * *
I. Maurice Sinet (1928–2016), known professionally as Siné, was a French political cartoonist known for his anti-Semitism and anarchism. Siné claimed that Jean Sarkozy was considering converting to Judaism for financial gain. He never did convert.
II. France Inter is a major public radio channel that is part of Radio France.
III. Le Canard enchaîné is a well-established (1915) satirical weekly newspaper with headquarters in Paris. Its name translates as “the chained duck” or “the chained newspaper,” as “canard” is French slang for “newspaper.”
13
FEBRUARY, A MONTH after the attack, the Charlie survivors visited their umpteenth new offices with good company: specialists in armor-plating and bombproof systems. From that point onward, they would be working in a bunker. Writing these lines, I recall what Patrick Pelloux said shortly after the attack, explaining on TV that “for the Charlie team, it wasn’t possible to work in a bunker. They didn’t talk about security.”
So it took the murder of ten of them, Georges included, for them to stop working in a carefree way.
Actually, since the time they were located on the rue Étienne-Marcel, Charlie Hebdo had moved continuously. In April 2011, because of their difficult financial situation, the team moved to the porte de Montreuil. Barely one year later, feeling they were too far from the center of Paris, they started looking for new offices in the 20th arrondissement, on boulevard Davout. There the cartoonists didn’t hesitate to hang their drawings in the windows. In November, when an issue of Sharia Hebdo came out after the elections in Tunisia (which voted in an Islamist party), there was an arson attack. Accommodated for a while by the left-wing newspaper Libération, the team was again forced to find new offices. They ended up on rue Serpollet, in the same arrondissement.
This time, it was under police surveillance: on the ground floor of the new building was a police station. Several police cars were permanently parked in front of the building. But as the newspaper lost more and more readers, the management team once again decided to find less expensive premises. The city of Paris then offered the paper space in a commercial building where the rent was very low, on the rue Nicolas-Appert, run by a property management company partially owned by the city. As the newspaper’s financial situation had become so difficult, the team signed up. But the building had several entrances and doors were often left open, because the companies with offices throughout the building’s three floors used messengers, as people who work there stated—people who also were attacked by the Kouachi brothers because they didn’t know that the satirical paper was located there.
So, a building with no security. Nevertheless, it was soon decided that work had to be done to make the premises safer, and it began in the summer of 2014. For the authorities, the satirical paper remained a target. The security section of the local administration, which was authorized to work on this type of case, was brought in. An inspector was appointed, responsible for finding ways to make the offices safe. He soon got in touch with the paper’s accountant, then met with him and his wife. The inspector immediately informed them that the building was seriously vulnerable in several areas. He particularly mentioned the access points on the two different streets, one on 6, allée Verte and the other on 10, rue Nicolas-Appert, which both led to the same building, as well as another access point in the basement, since the entrance to the parking lot provided passage from one road to the other. But the choice had been made, and it was too late to find somewhere else. Work would have to be done to make the place safe, and that was that.
Given the risks run by the paper, it was an unwise decision. The premises themselves were a problem. They were narrow and only had one exit door, which meant that the escape route could easily be blocked in an emergency. After his visit, the inspector left with everything he needed to carry out his study. He came back later to detail the security measures necessary, which mai
nly had to do with the offices.
That day, he was greeted by the accountant’s wife, to whom he presented several possibilities regarding making the space safe for the newspaper, the cartoonists, and the journalists. First, in spite of the narrowness of the space, he advised the installation of two airlock doors, which had to be opened in sequence, like the ones in certain banks. But he immediately realized that this would never be done, as the Charlie Hebdo staff had already started moving in. His second proposal: transform the small waiting area, where the staff had planned to put desks for the webmaster and the receptionist, into a buffer zone to protect access to the editorial room and the rest of the newspaper. It would be an area whose walls were bulletproof, actually turning it into an armor-plated room, at the end of which the two doors leading to the editorial room and Charb’s office would also be armor-plated and could be opened only by entering a code. Other measures included putting alarms in the offices with a videophone, installing a camera on the landing, and installing video cameras in the armor-plated waiting area. Finally, the inspector recommended putting special blinds on the windows that overlooked the street.
The report was passed on to the local government representative, who sent it to the newspaper’s management team, reminding them that the cartoonists were in great danger. The inspector responsible for the report had, moreover, detailed the threats along with his security recommendations. He was then told: “We would never be hit, not us.” Lack of foresight, carelessness, the feeling that humor makes people invulnerable? Finally, the paper’s own management team decided that a simple video camera would be installed in the entrance.
“Could we force them to protect themselves against their will?” the inspector wondered aloud when I asked him if they couldn’t have been obliged to accept the security measures. And he added that they could have asked for financial aid from the city of Paris, even the Ministry of Culture, which would have helped, given the attack on the paper a few years before. At the local government headquarters, and especially in the department that dealt with vulnerable targets, a commando attack with use of military weapons had even been envisaged—which was why the drastic security measures had been recommended. Even without the security doors, the Kouachis’ bullets would not have penetrated an armor-plated door. And even if the brothers had decided to use grenades, the team would certainly have had time to react.
Yes, there were flaws in the security preparations at the Charlie Hebdo office, and they were numerous—because unlike the local government’s department for vulnerable targets, the state, the police force, and the newspaper’s management team refused to accept the idea that we were already at war. A war of ignorance against culture, against the freedom so cherished by Georges, against obscurantism.
Yes, Saïd and Chérif Kouachi certainly had a great window of opportunity. In the days preceding January 7, when Saïd was bored in Reims with nothing to do but pray, and Chérif and his accomplices in Asnières were planning the attack, they probably didn’t expect that it would be so easy to carry out their massacre. In the end, they would find only one obstacle to getting in: the security code. Not difficult to surmount when you’re armed with a Kalashnikov.
Did the General Directorate for Internal Security allow itself to be fooled by the tricks taught to the terrorists during their training in Yemen? Chérif Kouachi had been identified in 2011. He’d been training with Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula and was instructed to keep a low profile, hide his fundamentalism, and shave off his beard once he returned to France. Alerted by the Americans that he was back, the French authorities put the Kouachi brothers under surveillance. But they were obeying al-Qaida’s orders, and, as they seemed to have come around, were no longer considered a threat, so the surveillance stopped. They had become “sleeper agents.” This is why, three days after the attack, the US Department of Homeland Security held a press conference to inform the reporters that “nothing in the surveillance of the Kouachis or Coulibaly led us to believe that they were preparing an attack.”I
* * *
Five thousand radicalized people are listed in the S file (S for state security). The files are reviewed every two years, and if the people in them have not been reported for any incidents, their names are removed. How many sleeper agents are there in our country? Since the publication of the caricatures of Mohammed, al-Qaida’s leaders have been determined to act against Western countries, and particularly against France. Hence the announcement of the 2013 fatwa against Charb, which was published in the magazine Inspire, founded by al-Qaida.
The Worst Is Yet to Come—that was the prophetic title of one of Georges’s books.
* * *
I. Amedy Coulibaly was the terrorist who killed a policeman on January 8, 2015, and four people in a kosher supermarket on January 9.
14
SIX MONTHS LATER.
Tonight, as with every night, I walk through Georges’s office, which remains just as he left it, an unfinished sketch on the drawing board, a lead pencil and an eraser next to it, his black leather vest on the chair, three felt pens in its pocket, his wobbly stack of daily newspapers on his desk. I walk over to the bookcase to replace a book. Suddenly I realize that the day I move, everything will be dismantled: the drawing board, the table bought at the flea market in Saint-Ouen, and, of course, his collection of books on press drawings, paintings, and artists’ biographies—a collection that he started more than fifty years ago.
Often, if he had run out of ideas, I would see him dive into one of those books or his own archives to get inspiration that the daily press didn’t provide for him. Right at the top of the bookcase, he had arranged Cavanna’s many publications. I pulled out one of them, Coeur d’artichaut (Artichoke Heart), which I’d read when it first came out. The dedication made me smile: “To get to an artichoke heart, Maryse, you have to pull off its leaves, Maryse, like a Daisy. But when it’s done, the heart is left and that’s the best part.” I put the book back in its place. Then I sat down in Georges’s armchair, where he’d spent many long days, and let the tears flow, tears I had held back for so long.
I stood up, eyes still fixed on the bookcase, and swore to myself that nothing would be dismantled. That was how I got the idea to donate the office-workshop to the International Center for Caricatures, Press Drawings, and Humor in Saint-Just-le-Martel, a center that was opened thanks to a report Georges wrote with a curator from the Bibliothèque nationale at the request of President Chirac. The very next day, I called Gérard Vanderbroucke, the director of the museum and an elected official from the region. I didn’t tell him about my idea, I simply asked him to come and see me the next time he was visiting Paris. Which he did. When I explained my idea to him, he was very moved. A week later, he came back with several friends of the museum who had known Georges well; every year, he had taken part in a festival of drawings in Saint-Just-le-Martel. They took photos of the office-studio, noting the slightest detail so they could reconstruct the room exactly. I have conserved those photos, which are so precious to me; they remind me of the time when Georges would sit at his table, early in the morning, surrounded by his newspapers and magazines. Holding a pencil, he would underline, circle, cut out, and archive articles until he found the idea that would inspire his drawing. In the afternoon, after a nap, he would sit down at his drawing board and finish the morning’s sketch.
On July 8, about a dozen friends of the museum accompanied Gérard Vanderbroucke to dismantle the brightly lit room that Georges had abandoned because the terrorists took his life.
“Darling, I’m going to Charlie.” When I woke up, I asked myself how I was going to bear letting the drawing board leave my apartment. I convinced myself that it was an excellent idea and that, from time to time, I could go and visit it in the little town near Limoges where Georges had tried to convince me to go with him so many times. My children and friends also thought that donating the office to a museum was a very good idea. Now I had to go through with it, stay strong all day
long, not allow myself to shed a single tear, prevent any weakness, comfort myself through taking action so as not to give in to despair.
The atmosphere among the movers was joyful. Everyone did his part. Some took charge of the furniture and some organized the books and other things in numbered cardboard boxes, so that when they arrived, every book, every object, would be in the right place. They spent some time deciding how to dismantle the drawing board. I didn’t know where Georges had put the instructions, and it was pointless to look for them in his files, whose contents never matched the file’s name. For an instant, I wished they wouldn’t be able to do it. If I turned it over and laid it flat, I could surely use it as a writing table . . .
They managed to fold it up and take it downstairs. I went out onto the balcony; from there, I watched it go into the truck. Suddenly I remembered that David André, the filmmaker who had made a movie about January 7 and who absolutely wanted to film the moving of the office, hadn’t arrived yet. And the table was no longer there!
I phoned him, and as he said he was on our street, we decided to take the drawing board out of the back of the truck. The friends of the museum very kindly agreed to put it back together on the sidewalk while the cameraman got ready to film. For the few minutes needed for the take, it was the main attraction in the neighborhood. I watched the scene from the balcony. Passersby huddled against storefront windows to see the extraordinary filming of a drawing board sitting on a Parisian sidewalk. Then they loaded it back into the truck. I saw it for the last time. I remembered the day when Georges had come back from the United States with the drawing board under his arm and kissed me when I opened the door for him, then carried me across the apartment to his bedroom. There will never be such happy moments anymore.
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