Paris (AFP)

"It's impossible to write anything". Thus begins "One minute forty-nine seconds", the vibrant story of Riss, director of Charlie Hebdo, on the deadly attack of January 7, 2015.

Like Philippe Lançon who had told his ordeal in "Le flambeau", crowned last year by the Prix Femina, Riss is a survivor.

The book, co-edited by Actes Sud and Éditions des Échappés (320 pages, 21 euros), will not give new life to the disappeared. But it does not forget that on January 7, 2015, in one minute and forty-nine seconds, twelve people lost their lives. Designers Cabu, Charb, Honoré, Tignous and Wolinski, psychoanalyst Elsa Cayat, economist Bernard Maris, police officer Franck Brinsolaro who was protecting Charb, the corrector Mustapha Ourrad and Michel Renaud, Frédéric Boisseau and Ahmed Merabet were mowed down by kalachnikov firing.

Injured with a bullet in his shoulder, Riss remembers his first terrifying night at the hospital. "I was convinced that the killers were looking for the wounded to finish them off." "It was not necessary to fall asleep to have nightmares, it was enough to stay awake."

"It is impossible to write," says Riss because "we do not transmit a disaggregation". However, with selflessness, a lot of courage and a masterful writing (one wonders why this book does not appear in any selection of literary awards), Riss manages to deny this assertion too peremptory.

The reasons for writing are multiple even if, Riss rebels, after the attack, "it was not necessary to revolt, not to designate responsible, nor reach out in the direction of cowards and guilty".

Above all, he is indignant, "to denounce the proselytism of archaic beliefs, of reactionary concepts, so as not to offend those who practice them and want to propagate them to feel less alone, locked up than they are in their thought. medieval and totalitarian ".

However, "the violence (...) has not disappeared, it has been supported, it has been cashed in. It has been absorbed".

"Those who believe that she is behind us have not understood that she is now inside us, there will be no reconstruction, and what no longer exists will never come back," insists Riss.

As when reading the "Lambeau" the sight is sometimes blurred by tears when Riss evokes his missing friends. The sweet Cabu, the cartoonist with "easy laugh", former Club Dorothée ...

- "Candor and daring" -

At no time does Riss name the two murderous brothers. But he does not hesitate to denounce "fanatics" who "accept perfection only that of God".

"If believing is a fundamental freedom, challenging the fundamentals of religious beliefs is another fundamental one," he recalls.

The attack on Charlie Hebdo "was above all a political crime," he says. "The aim of the terrorists of January 7 was to make disappear ideas, those who carried them and who were sometimes the only ones to express them".

Riss, alias Laurent Sourisseau, has no harsh words against those he calls "collabos".

"In January 2015, we were given beautiful theories to explain that the demonstrations of January 11 (after the attack) were the fact of a white France of Catholic zombies.It was also right to the infamous indictment of racism", s' he protested.

"2015 made me understand what collaboration was, because I could see how intellectual comfort copulating with the instinct for survival pushes the brightest minds towards complacency and cowardice," he adds.

The story is dedicated to "the innocent, alive, dead or crazy". The superb cover design is a detail of Géricault's "Chasseur à cheval".

"Kid, remembers Riss, I was fascinated" by this painting in particular by "the wide-eyed (the) horse crossed by fear or madness". He says he has repeatedly tried to reproduce this painting even if "daring to copy such a fabulous painting was sacrilege".

"But child, continues Riss, nothing is sacred".

"Perhaps this is why the cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo published the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad without a shadow of a doubt, Because they had kept their candor and daring from their childhood."

© 2019 AFP