In his new book, A minute forty-nine seconds, the director of Charlie Hebdo delivers an intimate account of the terrorist attack of January 7, 2015. He was Saturday the guest of Patrick Cohen, on Europe 1.

INTERVIEW

"I think we will never leave this room where we were on January 7". In his book Une minute forty-nine secondes , which has just been published by Actes Sud / Les Echappés, Riss, director of Charlie Hebdo , delivers an intimate account of the terrorist attack of January 7, 2015 against the satirical newspaper. Saturday guest of It happened this week , on Europe 1, he told us his difficulty, still current, to live with the memory of the attack.

"We do not want to give up those who were there"

"When we are constantly rehearsing the same things, we wonder if we are not inventing them, I found myself in a military hospital where there were victims of post-traumatic stress disorder. and I thought maybe it was going to fall on me one day, that I was going to wake up one morning and that I would not know who I am anymore, "says Riss.

"I think we will never leave this room where we were on January 7, even if we continue to live, to do the newspaper, to do a lot of things, we will always be in there. 'Do not want to leave those around us, it's hard to leave them,' says Charlie Hebdo's director.

"I always hear them, I see them talking, I hear them laugh"

In his book, Riss says that the day of the attack, he looked away to not see the corpses of his colleagues. He explains it. "I had understood what had happened, to see this show would not have brought me anything more, death is a moment of intimacy, I should never have been there, by their side For their last moments, I had the impression of violating an intimacy, I did not look at them to preserve this intimacy ", he develops on Europe 1." I hear them always, I see them speak, I hear them laugh, they are always a little with us, "he continues.

In his book, Riss also tells how he lost the taste for fiction, attempts to represent violence, in particular in cinema. "I find them derisory.All these petarades" do not represent "emotions", which are "indescribable". Reason why he prefers the words to the drawings to evoke the drama of January 7th. "It's impossible to draw that," he says. And to continue: "In the same way that I did not want to see certain things, I did not want to draw them".