'Indelibles': the joyous story of Charlie Hebdo before the massacre

ItIt was in the early 1990s when Renald Luzier, a student from the Loire Valley town of Tours, travelled up to Paris hoping to meet his idols, the cartoonists at the French investigative and satirical weekly Le Canard enchaîné. Hanging around the printing works where the weekly was rolling off the presses, he managed to collar one of them, Jean Cabut, better known under his pen name Cabu, who was one of France’s most prominent caricaturists.

He showed Cabu one of his own sketches, a caricature of Édith Cresson, the hapless, short-serving prime minister under then president François Mitterrand, and it made his idol laugh. It was a determining moment for the young man, then naïve and lacking in confidence, the beginning of his transformation into Luz, a cartoonist who mastered his art with individual style and effects. Before long, he joined the unruly and provocative band at Charlie Hebdo, becoming one of the satirical weekly’s prominent sketch artists alongside Charb and Riss, Honoré, Wolinski, Gébé, Catherine Meurisse and, of course, Cabu.

Cabu, Charb, Honoré, and Wolinski, along with their colleague Tignous, were all shot dead during the terrorist attack on the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo on January 7th 2015 by the jihadist brothers Chérif and Said Kouachi. The mass shootings, which claimed a total of 12 lives, happened as they held their weekly editorial meeting. Riss was seriously wounded.

Fortunately for them, Luz, who turned 43 that same day, and Meurisse arrived minutes late for the meeting. Both have separately published illustrated books about the massacre and its effect upon them, respectively in 2015 and 2016.

In Indélébiles (Indelibles), Luz tells the story of what was daily life at the Charlie office until that terrible January morning. It details how this gang of joyous eccentrics worked, their cleverness, their rush to meet deadlines, their smutty jokes – when the atmosphere was anything but feminine – and their rows (like the sketch immediately below, over Luz making their common, rounded editorial table shake by using a rubber too energetically). It’s a story of happiness, of the carefree, and their love of sketching. He chose not to enter into their political disagreements, nor their courageous or controversial positions on issues like religion.

There is no mention of the January 2015 shootings, which was the subject of his illustrated work Catharsis, published four months after the attack. But the tragedy hangs over Indélébiles, like in the opening and closing scenes in which is organised the impossible meeting of the living and the dead, including Gébé who died from cancer in 2004. It is with deference that Luz presents Gébé, an icon of Charlie, who was its editor-in-chief from 1971 to 1985 and who, during the 1970s, was a pioneer in environmental politics, notably with his book L’An 01 (Year 01).

In a long nocturnal monologue, in which he sketches himself with bold strokes of midnight blue (see below, right), he tells the story of the gang through anecdotes and playlets. He dedicates several pages to every one of his colleagues, in which he details his respect and undying friendship for them. None of them, however, is given as much tenderness as he devotes to Cabu, the modest master who was shot dead just days short of his 77th birthday, and without whom Luz would never have begun his career at La Grosse Bertha, the ancestor of Charlie.

Cabu, an artist who knew how to sketch in his pocket so as not to draw attention to himself, who caricatured the unsketchable French actor Pierre Arditi, and who hated with equal vigour the military and French rocker Johnny Hallyday. The love Luz had for his murdered elder colleague appears across all the pages of Indélébiles, and is moving.

One of the first pages of the book features a portrait of Cabu without his spectacles, laughing at the young Renald Luzier’s caricature of Édith Cresson, and one can imagine all the effort that was required of Luz to draw the scene. In this same concern of bringing them to life, he uses, with great success, the pens of his late colleagues to imitate their style and drawings.

Indélébiles tells above all the story of a publication in preparation, as it is written, drawn, set out on the page and printed. There is a very personal ‘making of’ about several reports, on various topics. The pages are also discreetly peppered with reconstitutions of past times, which were based on documents from his parents’ archives.

This book is lively and joyous, undoubtedly nostalgic (despite his denial of this), and radiant. There is foolery as well, in that 'politically incorrect' and provocative foolery of the Charlie Hebdo team, their sketches and their crazy ideas. A scene involving a mentally handicapped person prompts uneasy laughter, with dedications signed on a penis, and says all about how Luz and his friends approached their jobs. Indeed, Luz rarely omits to sketch a cock on the head of caricatures of himself as a young man – even on the book’s cover. 

“I don’t see it as a nostalgic book, but rather extremely positive,” said Luz in an interview with BFMTV last November. “The aim was to get rid of all this shitty symbolic varnish which has oozed over me and the friends.” He has succeeded, making the ink that stains cartoonists’ fingers and the bits of rubber erasers they scatter the symbols of a profession and a friendship that has remained indelible.

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Indélébiles by Luz

Published in France by Futuropolis, priced 24 euros.

• The French version of this article can be found here.

English version by Graham Tearse