Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Editor knew he was going to die, says his grieving partner
THE PARTNER of “Charb” – Stephane Charbonnier, editor of Charlie Hebdo – has said she always knew he would be assassinated.
In emotional interviews, 41year- old Jeannette Bougrab said: “I always knew he was going to die like Theo Van Gogh ( the Dutch cartoonist murdered in 2004).”
“I begged him to leave France, but he wouldn’t. My companion is dead because he drew in a newspaper.”
Bougrab, who had lived with Charbonnier and her adopted daughter May for three years, said: “He never had children because he knew he was going to die. He lived without fear, but he knew he would die.”
The lawyer and former French Secretary for Youth and Community Life described to French TV station BMFTV how she got the news he was killed.
“I was at a state meeting and I learned there had been a shooting,” she said.
“Then I sent him a text, a second text, third text, and then I phoned him and he wasn’t answering, and he never did that.
“When I got there, there were the cordons and we weren’t allowed to get in, and I learned there that he was dead.”
She added however: “He died standing. He defended secularism. He defended the spirit of Voltaire. He, in fact, was really the fruit of this ideal of the Republic that we’ve almost forgotten. He died, executed with his comrades, as he would say.”
Bougrab, a member of the French National Council of State who served under Nicolas Sarkozy’s administration, has been described as a “hard secularist”.
The daughter of Algerian immigrants, she is known as a fierce critic of religion, particularly of Islam.
Hitting out at the inadequate security given to the satirical magazine and its staff, she later told TF1: “I haven’t lost Charlie Hebdo. I’ve lost a loved one.
“I am here, not as a former government minister, but as a woman who has lost her man, who has been murdered by barbarians.
“I admired him before I fell in love with him and I loved him because of the way he was, because he was brave. He thought that life was a small thing when he was defending his ideals.
“Do you know people capable of dying for their ideas today? No. Because they’ve just died, they’ve just been murdered. That’s the reality, we could have avoided this massacre. We could have avoided it and we didn’t.”
Asked if she had been comforted by the world’s adoption of the “Je Suis Charlie” symbol, and that it could be seen as a sign of victory, of hope, Bougrab said: “Absolutely not, because he’s dead. It’s absolutely not a victory.
“It’s a defeat. It’s a tragedy for our country and I refuse to rejoice in the idea that people are demonstrating in the streets because they have torn away the precious being who accompanied me in life.”
She admitted that she and Charbonnier were an unlikely pairing, although she’d been fascinated by him before they met. He was a communist, she a member of UMP, the centre right party.
Now she would like to see all the murdered cartoonists buried in the Parthenon where Voltaire and Jean- Jacques Rousseau lie. – Daily Mail