PARIS — For years after the attack on the Charlie Hebdo office, the most unbearable words for Corinne Rey, known as Coco, were, “In your place.” Other people couldn’t put themselves in her place at the satirical magazine. Others couldn’t know what they would have done.
On Jan. 7, 2015, Ms. Rey, a cartoonist, was leaving the magazine’s Paris offices to pick up her 1-year-old daughter from day care when she was confronted by two masked men brandishing assault rifles. They pointed the guns at her head. “Take us to Charlie Hebdo!” they shouted. “You have insulted the Prophet.”
In her recently published graphic novel, “To Draw Again,” Ms. Rey, 38, portrays herself as a small, trembling figure being tracked up the stairs by two immense featureless shapes whose weapons bear down on her. “That is how I saw them,” she said in a recent interview in Paris. “Monsters, dressed in black, huge, with no human trait.”
Chérif and Saïd Kouachi, the terrorists, had a clear objective: to avenge Charlie Hebdo’s publication of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad by killing its editor, Stéphane Charbonnier, known as Charb, and the staff. They prodded Ms. Rey at gunpoint toward the Charlie office.
the first to be shot. Ms. Rey hid under a desk. “I heard the shots, the Allahu akbar, and the silence afterward,” she said. “No screams. Not one. I remember the sounds, precisely, of chairs, of people getting up from their chairs, just as they were killed.”
In her book, a way to speak of and transcend the unsayable, Ms. Rey chooses not to portray the terrible scene of prone bodies. Instead there are pages of darkness, as if of dense tangled dark wire, the void left by her dead friends and colleagues.
killed a dozen people that day. It is hard to imagine a more brutal confrontation of a free press and the fanatic’s fury. The words of the Kouachi brothers, whom the police killed two days later, fill a page of the book: “We have avenged the Prophet. We have killed Charlie Hebdo.”
“I was left with terrible guilt feelings,” Ms. Rey said in the interview. “I had the impression of making a choice, when really there was none.”
Over 10 pages of “To Draw Again,” she evokes her self-interrogation in a maelstrom of captioned images: “And if I had screamed for help? And if I had tried to flee? And if I had pushed them down the stairs? And if. And if. And if …”
One absurd image, of her kicking her massive assailants in the face, conveys that there was no if, just as at Auschwitz, in Primo Levi’s memorable phrase, there was no why.
beheading last October of Samuel Paty, a history teacher in a Paris suburb who showed images of the Prophet Muhammad in a class on free speech, affected Ms. Rey deeply — proof that the battle for which her friends’ lives were lost continues in France.
“Paty is somehow a member of Charlie, almost a colleague,” she said. “He wanted to explain what freedom of expression is. Explain that blasphemy is not a crime in France.” Explain freedom of opinion and thought, too. Explain freedom itself.
A middle school in France refused to be named for Mr. Paty for fear of being attacked, she said. “I, too, am sometimes afraid, but I transcend that fear.”
I asked Mr. Fieschi whether Ms. Rey had changed since the devastating day known simply as “7,” much as 9/11 became an American shorthand. “More than change her, I think it revealed her,” he said. “It deepened her. Her simplicity lost its naïveté. She always fought for freedom. She does so even more now.”
Ms. Rey is uncomfortable with the idea of victimhood. She does not want to be seen that way. She has fought to emerge from an unimaginable place. By depicting Coco’s choice in her book, she has helped herself lay that choice to rest.
In 2018, she had another child, a boy. “I am a mother,” she said. “I draw, and that is my passion. Charlie did not die; it lives. I am a little better, even if the absentees around the table are always there.”
PARIS — No other country in Western Europe has suffered as much from terrorism as France over the past decade. With more than 50 attacks that have killed nearly 300 people — including dozens of children and teenagers — the nation has borne the brunt of some of the worst attacks in Europe.
Now, France plans to memorialize this collective suffering with a new museum that will trace the development of terrorism over the ages, including the attacks on the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and the Bataclan concert hall in Paris that have deeply shaken the country in recent years.
The move is a bold one given that the country is still grappling with the trauma of these attacks, with victims whose physical and psychological wounds are still raw. Only last fall, there were a series of new attacks, including the beheading of Samuel Paty, a history teacher who showed cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in a class on free speech.
In addition to the death toll, nearly 1,000 people have been wounded in attacks since 2012.
But the planners of the project say the museum is needed to help the people of France to confront and understand a scourge that they will be living with for some time.
pledged in September 2018 to create a memorial museum to place the victims of terrorist attacks “at the heart of our memories.” The new museum is expected to be inaugurated in the Paris area by 2027, and will aim to show how France and other terrorism-affected countries have reacted to attacks over the past 50 years, with a particular emphasis on the resilience of their people.
Mr. Rousso said the perpetrators of the attacks would also be featured in the museum. Responding to questions he has faced about whether the museum would unintentionally glorify them, he said it was important to represent them as well.
who wrote a book about his experience. “I prefer to avoid seeing their pictures. I know a lot of victims wouldn’t be able to handle it.”
the Charlie Hebdo attack in 2015, in which a dozen people working for the satirical magazine were slaughtered. In addition to the beheading of Mr. Paty in October, three people were killed at a church in Nice that month.
targeting Napoléon Bonaparte, will also be part of a permanent exhibition.
The museum’s exact location is expected to be decided by next spring.
A memorial for victims of terrorism has existed in Paris since 1998, in the gardens of Les Invalides, where Napoléon is entombed — a fountain and bronze statue of a beheaded woman with dark, empty eyes and her head in her hands. But unlike the reflecting pools that mark the 9/11 terror attacks in New York, the Paris memorial is not widely known or visited, except by officials commemorating France’s national day of remembrance for terrorism victims on March 11.
“The nation does not forget,” Mr. Macron wrote on Twitter after laying a wreath at the statue at this year’s commemoration.
it is here to stay, said Ms. Rudetzki, who is also a member of the memorial museum advisory committee and was wounded in a terrorist bombing in 1983 that cost her the use of her legs.
The future memorial will list the names of victims of terrorism attacks in France and French victims of attacks abroad. It will cover a period starting in 1974, the year that Carlos the Jackal carried out the bombing of a Paris drugstore and when France began granting “a medal of recognition” to victims of terrorist attacks, Mr. Rousso said.
the 22 July Centre in Oslo, officials have started identifying objects and documents that could be showcased, such as text messages sent by victims, sealed court records, and poems and drawings left at ephemeral memorials.
“Terrorism, whether we like it or not, is part of our societies,” Mr. Rousso said. “Creating a museum is not a way to put the issue behind us. It is a way to make people understand it.”
A cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad — this time, its use in a British classroom — is once again stoking anger and national debates about the limits of tolerance, free speech and education.
The teacher who showed the cartoon to students this week has received death threats and is under police protection, officials said — echoes of the deadly attacks on the French magazine Charlie Hebdo and on a French teacher last year for having shown similar cartoons.
Loud but nonviolent protesters blocked access to the school and demanded the dismissal of the teacher at Batley Grammar School in West Yorkshire, in northern England, calling the incident an example of bigotry. Many Muslims consider any physical depiction of Muhammad to beblasphemous.
On Thursday the school, near Leeds, suspended the teacher — who supporters said had used the image in a lesson about religion and free expression. The school said in a statement that “we would like to offer a sincere and full apology.” It said it had removed the offending material, which it did not describe, but some protesters said it was one or more of the cartoons published by Charlie Hebdo.
she wrote in a Twitter thread, and “the school should ask whether the issue of blasphemy could have been taught in a better way that didn’t necessitate the use of cartoons depicting Muslims wearing bomb turbans.”
At the same time, she said the teacher “should not be named, nor hounded,” and added, “I urge the small but noisy group of protesters to calm down & go home. There are better ways to enjoy the good weather.”
And in more scabrous terms, she advised anti-Muslim “commentators, media outlets, twitter trolls, politicos,” not to be so eager for “a ‘them Muslims’ row.”
