Bernard Verlhac, known as “Tignous”, had this in common with his favorite animal – the panda – that he was a tender heart, but the impressive kind when he got angry. And on this Tuesday in the summer of 2013, Tignous was pissed. What tormented the designer of Charlie – he then also officiated at Marianne where we were colleagues – it was information that the two police officers responsible for Charb’s security were certainly going to be reassigned, because they were considered “comfort protection”. It was several times in a few months that, through leaks to the press, the security system of the director of publication of Charlie Hebdo was singled out, among others, as superfluous. “Profiteurs of the Republic”, would even headline VSD on December 4, 2014.
So that day, Tignous was fuming. His good-natured rocker face – brown sideburns and happy teeth – had turned into a storm. Sitting at his desk, in the heart of the open space with red walls of Mariannehe recalled that Charb was threatened by very serious fatwas; that in 2011, a Molotov cocktail fire ravaged the premises of Charlie ; that in September 2012, a young man was arrested in Toulon in possession of a knife: he was talking about using it in Paris against the weekly’s cartoonists… So: “who [étaient] these assholes who [laissaient] imply a VIP whim?”
Of course, no one imagined what was going to happen on rue Nicolas Appert on January 7, 2015. And in particular: not those of Charlie. The fact remains that in the years preceding the attack, cartoonists, journalists, employees of the satirical newspaper persisted in defending a right – ours -, a freedom – ours -, despite threats from enemies that they knew were serious. Courage, that’s what Tignous’s anger said. Unconsciousness, that’s what the echoing casualness responded. In a magnificent chapter of his Lambeau, the journalist and writer Philippe Lançon, seriously injured in the face by a burst of the Kouachi brothers, describes the scene following the attack, where he found himself lying next to the inert bodies of Bernard Maris and Tignous: “I did not see at the time what the police report, read eighteen months later, revealed to me: a pen remained stuck straight between the fingers of one hand, in a vertical position when Tignous was drawing or writing. they did irruption. The investigators noted this detail which indicates the speed of the massacre and the stupor which preceded the execution of each of us. Tignous died with a pen in his hand like an inhabitant of Pompeii seized by lava. […]”. The image speaks of the suddenness of the violence which freezes the gestures of the ordinary in its brutality – a designer in the act of drawing. We cannot help but also see in this felt pen planted vertically, the image of a dead man with, in his hand, the instrument of his right and his freedom.
Where are we, ten years later?
Ten years have passed. “The drama is over. Who is he who is coming forward? – Me for there was one survivor of the shipwreck.” When I first met Riss last spring, these words at the end of Moby-Dick made their way. A survivor came forward, quite faithful to the photos: tall and melancholic. During the conversation we talked about Salman Rushdie, whose work Flammarion had just published The Knife. In this story, we learn that at the time of the attack which he survived, Rushdie was living at his request without police protection: the writer wanted to believe that water had flowed under the bridges, that the fatwa had been blunted, and that hatred had forgotten him. I asked Riss, now publishing director of Charlie, what he thought about it. He who, since 2015, has lived with the shadow of the police officers who precede him everywhere. “I understand the temptation of optimism,” he replied. “We would like to believe at one point that we can breathe, do without protection. But this hope is when we have never experienced the emergence of violence, the confrontation with death… Because afterward, it never leaves you again. It’s like a vibration in the body, constantly: you know that it can change at any moment. dog who got beaten up all his life. this vibration in him…”
What’s the point of birthdays we don’t celebrate? Painful anniversaries, such as the tenth anniversary of the attacks of January 2015, which killed rue Nicolas Appert, in Paris, on Wednesday 7; in Montrouge on Thursday 8; and at the Hyper Cacher at Porte de Vincennes on Friday the 9th? To commemorate the dead, of course; to celebrate the living. But also: to take stock. Where are we, ten years later? What would we say to the 11 of Charlie Hebdo ? That freedom of expression has triumphed? We should keep the truth from them: Samuel Paty, beheaded after leaving his college for giving a lesson on freedom of expression to his 4th grade students and, to illustrate his point, showing two caricatures of Mohammed published by Charlie. They should silence Dominique Bernard, stabbed in his high school in Arras because he was a French teacher and because, in the words of his assassin, “it is one of the subjects where we transmit the passion for Republic, democracy, human rights, French rights and unbelievers”. They should be kept quiet about the fear that is taking hold everywhere – “the blue scare,” as Riss once described it in an editorial. What would we say to Ahmed Merabet? To Clarissa Jean-Philippe? That the Republic stands firm in the face of Islamism? What would we say to the four of Hyper Cacher? That anti-Semitism has declined? While since October 7, 2023, it has soared like never before in decades? That for the first time since the Second World War, many French Jews are afraid to the point of removing their names from mailboxes? This anniversary is not only sad because it commemorates the attacks which devastated France. It is also so because, ten years later, we cannot help but draw a bitter and worried assessment.
.