‘The pleasure of drawing is stronger than fear!’

To mark the 10^th anniversary of the attack on Charlie Hebdo on January 7, 2015, the satirical newspaper is publishing a book that pays tribute to the eight members of the team murdered that day. Charlie Liberty. A Journal of Their Lives (“Charlie Liberty: A Diary of Their Lives”) is a deeply moving book in its fragility and its very simplicity, as it mostly limits itself to showing images by cartoonists Cabu, Charb, Honoré, Tignous and Wolinski, and texts by psychoanalyst Elsa Cayat, proofreader Mustapha Ourrad and economist Bernard Marris. Among them are youthful drawings by Cabu (an ad for Météore pens, caricatures drawn when he was 15), Charb (a family portrait, a high-school fanzine) and Honoré (contributions to the Almanach Vermot). In The Lambeau (“The Shred”), Philippe Lançon called those who disappeared “the dispossessed.” This book restores a solidarity rooted in the joys of childhood. Interview with Riss, director of Charlie Hebdo.

“It’s impossible to write anything” about the attack on Charlie Hebdoyou wrote in your book “One minute forty-nine seconds” (“One minute forty-nine seconds”). Is this why the Charlie Liberty tribute book leaves so little room for text and favors drawings?

We always feel a little illegitimate trying to evoke the disappeared, it is very uncomfortable, the years pass, we fear oblivion. They were artists above all, and their lives as artists and intellectuals began early, before Charlieand radiated beyond Charlie. I wanted to show their talent, their artistic sensibility, what they created. Besides, I like to give the material directly to the reader; I prefer them to discover it for themselves, to make up their own story.

You have often stated that you refuse to see Charlie turned into a museum. So, if you don’t see this book as a museum, what is it?

I wanted to make people understand everything we’ve lost. Each of them was a small world, had a unique sensibility, and that is what has been destroyed. The more years pass, the more time stands still, as if it had stopped on January 7, 2015. I realized this when I meet high school students, they were 5 years old at the time. For them, it’s an event that belongs to history. For us, that’s weird, because we still think of it as a current event, a real-life event.

The idea is to show that Charlie‘s dead are still very much alive, that their work is full of energy, and so to pass on to young people this taste for creativity and humor and inspire them to do likewise. We continued to produce Charlieand we want to keep it that way. So, yes, a museum, because a museum inspires, it is a place of transmission rather than homage or commemoration. When we commemorate November 11, we don’t want to go through what the veterans of the First World War experienced. This book is not a monument to the dead, it’s a monument to life, to their lives.

You have 77.06% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.