‘It’s like a sci-fi satellite’: The top-secret headquarters of the new Charlie Hebdo

CHARLIE Hebdo’s offices now have more guards than writers following the murderous attacks of January 2015. It’s not the only thing that’s changed.

Mourners gather in Berlin for one of many vigils held around the world to honour the 12 killed by gunmen at Charlie Hebdo’s offices.

AT a top-secret location in the heart of Paris, a man enters a building, five bodyguards slipping unobtrusively through the door behind him.

Inside, more guards check his identification and bag before he can pass through the airport-style security gates and into the entirely bulletproof offices where he works.

This is Riss, Managing Editor of Charlie Hebdo, the satirical newspaper at the centre of the terrorist attacks that rocked Paris in January 2015. And these are their stark white, hidden headquarters, where guards outnumber the staff of 25.

“It looks like a science-fiction satellite, but right in the heart of Paris,” staff writer Marie Darrieussecq told news.com.au. “We have to protect writers and cartoonists between thick walls with guards. It looks like science-fiction, but it’s now.”

When Ms Darrieussecq heard the news that 12 people had been killed and 11 injured in the grisly gun massacre at the newspaper, she sat straight down and wrote an email and a letter to the surviving editor, Gerard Biard.

“I wrote, ‘Tell me what to do for you’,” said the noted novelist and Libération writer. “I thought, the newspaper has to go on.

“He wrote, ‘Yes, write a column and hire me writers.’

“The webmaster was just 23 and had two bullets in his back, they didn’t know if he would live. What was very shocking to people was that they killed many cartoonists.”

Author Marie Darrieussecq became the unofficial spokesperson for the newspaper across the world. Picture: Text Publishing.

A wreath of flowers laid outside Charlie Hebdo’s former office in Paris.

Ms Darrieussecq hired two other writers and, as the world reeled in horror, they began working on the future of the newspaper. The 47-year-old wrote about her favourite topics — animals, ecology, feminism and psychoanalysis — carefully steering clear of editorialising about the tragedy.

“They told us, please don’t spend too much time writing about it because we are making this special edition,” she said, referring to the famous “Je Suis Charlie” survivors’ issue, which had a print run of almost eight million, rather than the paper’s usual 60,000.

“It was a beautiful edition, with what they lived, minute by minute. I understood it was not our story to tell.”

However, since Ms Darrieussecq could speak and write English, she became an unofficial spokesperson for the newspaper in the world’s media, from Sweden to the US.

As the story of the terror attacks spread, people gathered in streets from Europe to Australia to pay tribute to the dead, and the “Je Suis Charlie” catchphrase took hold.

But as more eyes saw the publication’s apparently anti-Islamic cartoons, which the gunmen had given as a reason for the attacks, protests sprung up in Muslim communities as far away as Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Ms Darrieussecq found herself having to justify the publication to a vast new audience and “explain the spirit of Charlie Hebdo to people who don’t speak French and don’t know the context”.

Afghans hold posters that read ‘I love Muhammad’ during a protest against Charlie Hebdo’s satirical caricatures. Picture: Rahmat Gul

A demonstration against terrorism in Paris after a series of five attacks occurred across the Ile-de-France region. Picture: Corentin Fohlen/World Press Photo

Many of the cartoons were published online without their titles, erasing any hint of satirical humour. The fact the newspaper targeted Judaism and Catholicism too was overlooked, she says, as it was portrayed as anti-Islam.

Its strong feminist voice, which led the newspaper to object to the veil, was skimmed over, too.

“It was not meant to be read outside of France,” she said. “Even in France, everyone doesn’t read it. I could buy one every three months, but I was happy it existed.

“It was part of the landscape. This French humour can be very dark sometimes.

“It was strange to me to repeat and repeat, people who write are not terrorists. It’s a strange world. I was born in a world where freedom of speech was a right.”

Ms Darrieussecq thinks the country seems more divided now, rather than more united.

More than a year on, “we are frightened, of course”, and the newspaper’s staff suspect their location won’t stay secret much longer.

Yet the mother of two says she feels most scared in the supermarket or at the school gates when she picks up her children. In the January 2015 attacks, artists, police and Jewish people were murdered. But in the November killings, she says, “it was the whole population.”

The “very free spirit” of Charlie Hebdo has not changed “but we miss some people, they will not come back. In that sense, it is a different newspaper”.

Marie Darrieussecq appears at the Sydney Writers Festival on Thursday 19 and Sunday 22 at 9am and 11.30am and at various Melbourne events from May 23 to 25. Her book, Men, is available from Text Publishing.

Originally published as ‘It’s like a sci-fi satellite’: The top-secret headquarters of the new Charlie Hebdo