Ten years on from the terrorist attack that killed 12 people including eight journalists and cartoonists, the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo still publishes weekly from a secret address in Paris, with staff (and their bodyguards) taking renewed care to avoid detection.
But on Saturday in Galway, I had the pleasure of interviewing a couple of them on stage at the annual cartoon festival. And in keeping with the host city, it was an enjoyably relaxed affair.
If there was a security presence in or around the building – gardaí had been informed, I know – it was very discreet.
Our panel was there to discuss the question “Are we still Charlie?”: a reference to the famously fashionable T-shirt slogan of 2015, “Je suis Charlie”. Which, thanks to a macabre coincidence, has taken on a whole new meaning recently.
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Among the cartoons on display in our venue, the Portershed, was one by Graeme Keyes featuring a mob of English nationalists and gun-toting Trump supporters massed behind a banner saying: “Je suis Charlie Kirk”.
But our panel wasn’t all about Charlies. Another of my guests was Cristina Sampaio from Lisbon, who in 2023 made a short, animated film which, although inspired by a police shooting in France, managed to annoy police in Portugal too.
She is now facing criminal charges and had to report her departure for Ireland, pending a trial that could yet land her in jail.
On the lighter side, the panel also included Thibaut Soulcié, whose main threat was from editors at L’Equipe if he didn’t get his next day’s sports cartoon in on time. He had already submitted a draft for approval, but I think was putting the finishing touches to it on his laptop in between questions from me. The published work was signed with a shamrock as a gesture to his location.
The two Charlie Hebdo guests were Camille Besse, a young cartoonist who worked there for a few years before the massacre, and Antonio Fischetti, a veteran who has been with the magazine since 1997 and who would quite likely have died with the rest of his friends in 2015 except he was off that day, attending the funeral of an aunt.
[ As it happened: Charlie Hebdo Paris attackOpens in new window ]
Fischetti’s story has been told in a remarkable 2023 film, screened later on Saturday evening in Charlie Byrne’s bookshop. In fact, my afternoon was bookended (in more ways than one) by visits to that famed establishment on Middle Street.
First the shop’s manager Vinny Browne had me in to sign copies of my own recent publication. Then, post-panel, we returned for the local premiere of Je ne veux plus y aller, mama (I don’t want to go there any more, mom).
In keeping with a low-budget production, the movie was projected onto a makeshift screen: a white sheet pegged out against one of the bookshelves. And only a dozen or so viewers braved what threatened to be a classic French art movie, in which not much happens at great length.
The near two-hour film followed Fischetti’s attempts to come to terms with the events of 2015, through conversations with a psychoanalyst friend and in flashbacks to another film he once made with a late colleague at the magazine, Elsa Cayat, also a psychologist.
Cayat, who contributed a weekly column called Charlie Divan (Charlie on the Sofa), was the only woman to die in the massacre, perhaps being specially targeted because she was Jewish.
In the new film, we see her and Fischetti discussing ideas about sexuality, including the age-old juxtaposition of prostitutes and virgins (as a child of Neapolitan emigrants, Fischetti was surrounded from childhood by depictions of the Virgin Mary).
But most of the movie revolves around his more recent therapy sessions. Which does not sound like a riveting subject for cinema. And yet somehow the likable Fischetti draws you into the plot of his own life, partly by not being in control of it.
The moving dénouement (outcome), which emerged accidentally despite his attempts to change the subject, involves the story of a “crib” he spent his first years sleeping in, and of an older brother who preceded him but died in infancy.
He may have been haunted by survivor’s guilt all his life. Then he missed the massacre, by having a funeral to attend. His film will not get any general release but it’s well worth seeing if you get the chance.
Speaking of being drawn in, I am since my latest visit to Galway the proud owner of a framed caricature of myself at work. Cartoonists never rest, clearly, as I noticed at the festival club on Saturday night, where artists were sketching each other over pints.
But earlier, the woman who organised the Charlie Hebdo panel, French honorary consul for Connacht Catherine Gagneux, had me presented with a portrait she had secretly commissioned from Brady Izquierdo Rodriguez, a Cuban artist now exiled in Ireland. His depiction is of a relaxed, affable newspaper columnist, untroubled by deadlines and generally at ease with the world.
Apart from that, he got me to a tee.
