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For staff of Charlie Hebdo, it's on to the next deadline

 
Employees from Charlie Hebdo meet in the offices of the left-wing daily Liberation in Paris on Friday. Two days after the attacks by terrorists on the weekly, the newspaper's remaining staff members gathered to build the next issue while still in shock. [Bertrand Guay | Pool via New York Times]
Employees from Charlie Hebdo meet in the offices of the left-wing daily Liberation in Paris on Friday. Two days after the attacks by terrorists on the weekly, the newspaper's remaining staff members gathered to build the next issue while still in shock. [Bertrand Guay | Pool via New York Times]
Published Jan. 12, 2015

PARIS — About 9:10 on Monday evening, laughter and a round of applause broke out among the surviving staff of Charlie Hebdo, followed shortly by cries — joyous if ironic—- of "Allahu akbar!"

The group was cheering Rénald Luzier, the cartoonist known as Luz, who on the umpteenth try had produced what they thought was the perfect cover image for the most anticipated issue ever of this scrappy iconoclastic weekly, which will appear Wednesday.

"Habemus a front page," Gérard Biard, one of the paper's top editors, said with a smile, emerging from the staff's makeshift newsroom and deploying the phrase used to announce a new pope. To find the right image, "We asked ourselves, 'What do we want to say? What should we say? And in what way?' " Biard said. "About the subject, unfortunately we had no doubt."

Since Friday, just two days after gunmen had slaughtered 12 people at the paper, about 25 members of the staff had been huddled in the offices of the left-wing daily Libération, under heavy police protection, to work on the next issue. They were still in shock, and confounded to have suddenly become heroes of free speech to the same political and religious establishments they had long mocked.

Unsurprisingly, the latest cover features a cartoon of the prophet Mohammed holding a sign that reads, "Je suis Charlie,'' under the headline "All is forgiven."

The Charlie Hebdo staff's first editorial meeting Friday began not with article pitches but remembrances for murdered colleagues, updates on the wounded and a surprise visit by Prime Minister Manuel Valls and Fleur Pellerin, the culture and communication minister — rare appearances at a newspaper more akin to The Onion than to Le Monde (and more likely to skewer the officials than interview them).

As the journalists wrestled with grief, there were flashes of mordant humor. Cartoonists sketched while describing how hard it was to go on after the horror in their offices; others lashed out in anger at the killers. The main question looming over the moment: How could they possibly be funny at a time like this?

"We don't know how to do anything but laugh," said Biard, who was on vacation the day of the shootings.

Worldwide, the massacre has set off debates about security lapses, Islamic radicalism and turning points. Millions of supporters have embraced the slogan "I am Charlie." But here, in a top-floor conference room with a stunning view of the Eiffel Tower, this was just a bunch of cartoonists and journalists: crying, snacking, laughing, breaking the rules against smoking inside and trying to hold themselves together long enough to produce an issue.

"We decided that we would do a normal edition, not a memorial issue," Biard said Friday, where an emotional three-hour staff meeting had just ended with applause. Caterers brought in trays of smoked salmon, sandwiches and cream-filled desserts. A row of plainclothes police officers stood watch outside. Journalists hovered. Five desktop computers donated by Le Monde were set up on a round glass table. Since the attacks, financial donations have been pouring in to the financially troubled publication, and a fund has been set up, jaidecharlie9.fr ("I help Charlie").

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As the newsroom sprang to life Friday afternoon, Biard reflected.

"They killed people who drew cartoon characters. That's it. That's all these guys do. If they're afraid of that," what's their god? he asked, inserting an expletive for emphasis.

The logistics of putting out the paper are tricky. The paper had to file court requests to recover material from its office, now sealed off as a crime scene. With the help of Libération, Charlie Hebdo will print 3 million copies of the issue, compared with its usual 60,000 copies. The paper was also expected to be translated into several languages.

One idea was clear: keeping the staff members' memories alive by publishing past work. The paper will run drawings by the four cartoonists killed: Stéphane Charbonnier, known as Charb, the paper's editor; Jean Cabut, known as Cabu; Bernard Verlhac, known as Tignous; and Georges Wolinski. They also planned to honor other victims: running work by Bernard Maris, an economist, and Elsa Cayat, a psychiatrist, who both wrote columns; and perhaps, for Mustapha Ourrad, a copy editor, publishing an unedited column. "In this edition, they didn't kill anyone," Biard said. The staff members will "appear as they always did." Asked what else would go in the paper, Patrick Pelloux, an emergency room doctor who also writes for Charlie, said with a laugh: "Oh, I don't know. Not much happening this week."

On Saturday, staff members began trickling in around midday. Cartoons began appearing on the conference room wall, which was filled with them by the evening. Someone could be heard crying inside. Corinne Rey, who goes by Coco, sat at the table, brush in hand, drawing. She said the gunmen had forced her to punch in the code to let them into the paper's offices.

When the gunmen arrived, some thought it might be a joke, according to staff members. After years of threats, Charbonnier had made a joke of the jihadist cry "Allahu akbar," or "God is great," said Zineb El Rhazoui, 32, a Charlie Hebdo reporter who grew up in Morocco and wrote a cartoon biography of Mohammed with Charbonnier.

"It was like his war cry: 'Allahu akbar this.' 'Allahu akbar that,' "she said. "We joked with him that he needed to stop using the phrase because the day the assassins actually come to kill us, we won't know if it's them screaming this phrase or Charb," she said.

Work ground to a halt Sunday, when a demonstration denouncing the violence drew world leaders and more than 1.5 million people to the streets of Paris. Marching in the front row, many Charlie Hebdo staff members wore white headbands that read "Charlie," a nod to the paradox of the outsider weekly's sudden arrival on the front lines of a global confrontation. At the demonstration, Pelloux cried for a long time on the shoulder of President François Hollande when the president greeted the Charlie Hebdo staff and families of those killed at the related attack at a kosher supermarket.

Pelloux was at a meeting of emergency room doctors when he received a call with news of the Charlie Hebdo attack. He arrived with other rescue workers to find the carnage in a room rank with gun smoke, and began checking to see who was alive and who was dead.

"I've seen cadavers," he said. But this "was insane."

Expressing the trauma of survivor guilt during an interview, he said, "I shouldn't be alive," his eyes welling up.

While the staff worked all weekend, the plainclothes policemen sat outside the newsroom door. One officer said he had once been assigned to Marine Le Pen, the leader of the right-wing National Front, who made a point of shunning the rally Sunday. The officers lost one of their number in the attacks inside the office on Wednesday, too: Franck Brinsolaro, who had been assigned to guard Charbonnier. Staff members said Brinsolaro had become a part of the tightly knit Charlie family, even bringing in his mother's homemade pâté at Christmastime.

Charlie Hebdo, which was founded in 1992 and grew out of an earlier satirical weekly, Hari Kiri, was an equal-opportunity offender, taking on the Roman Catholic Church, Judaism and Islam, along with secular targets, including — often wickedly — the politicians who have now rallied to their side. It believed in blasphemy.

"The only thing that is sacred is free expression," Rhazoui said. Their cartoons of Mohammed posed the greatest threat. They were sued for defamation for running the cartoons of Mohammed originally published in a Danish newspaper in 2005 and won the suit. In 2011, the paper's former offices were firebombed after it published a special Arab Spring edition, "guest edited" by Mohammed, who appears in a cartoon with a clown's nose saying, "100 lashes if you're not dead of laughter." The perpetrators of the firebombing were never found.

Ever since, the paper had run a little tag on its front page that read "irresponsible publication," a dig at the critics who said they had been asking for it. "We felt very alone" after the 2011 attack, said Laurent Léger, an investigative reporter at the paper since 2009, who last week survived by ducking and said he would write for this week's issue about the investigations into the attacks.

He said he was confident the staff would rally for this week's issue, but he worried about the weeks to come. "What we're afraid of is after," he said.