Editor knew he’d be killed, says girlfriend
THE editor of Charlie Hebdo knew he would be killed one day and his partner repeatedly begged him to go into hiding, it emerged yesterday. Stephane Charbonnier – known as Charb – was singled out and shot by terrorists when they stormed the magazine’s offices in Paris on Wednesday.
In an emotional interview, his partner Jeannette Bougrab, a former government minister, said: ‘He never had children because he knew he was going to die. He lived without fear, but he knew he would die.’
Miss Bougrab, 41, who had lived with Mr Charbonnier and her adopted daughter May for three years, added: ‘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.’
The former government secretary for youth and community life said: ‘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.’
The lawyer described how she heard the news of his death: ‘I was at a state meeting and I learned there had been a shooting. Then I sent him a text, a sec- ond 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.’
Miss Bougrab added: ‘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.’
Miss Bougrab, who served in Nicolas Sarkozy’s administration, has been described as a ‘hard secularist’. A daughter of Algerian i mmigrants, she is known as a fierce critic of religion, and of Islam in particular.
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,
‘Executed with his comrades’
or hope, she 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 refused 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.’
Miss Bougrab said she and Mr Charbonnier, 47, 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. ‘I have lost my love, lost a part of me. I was with a hero I admired. We tried to live normally but it was complicated.’
She said all the murdered cartoonists should be buried in the Parthenon where Voltaire and Jean- Jacques Rousseau lie, adding: ‘They died defending freedom of expression.’
Miss Bougrab’s comments came as defiant Charlie Hebdo staff gathered in the offices of a rival newspaper yesterday.
Journalists and cartoonists met staff from French newspaper Liberation, which – along with several other media outlets – have promised to help them produce next week’s magazine.
Last night a prospective cover of next week’s edition was circulated on social media, showing a sombre black background bearing the message: ‘Urgent recherche six dessinateurs’, meaning ‘urgently seeking six cartoonists’.