Charlie Hebdo, Hyper Cacher… 10 years after the attacks of January 2015, new programming on television

Wednesday January 7, 2015, France descends into horror. For three days, from the Parisian editorial staff of Charlie Hebdo at the Catalano printing works in Dammartin-en-Goële (Seine-et-Marne), from the streets of Montrouge (Hauts-de-Seine) to the Hyper Cacher supermarket in the 20th arrondissement of Paris, three men sow death. “It happened like lightning,” summarizes the cartoonist Riss, a surviving member of the satirical weekly.

This week, television channels are giving a voice to the survivors of these attacks. Their stories nourish the collective duty of memory. Not without upheaval. During the presentation of 2015 attacks – What binds us (M6), Christophe Molmy, former head of the Research and Intervention Brigade which organized the assault on the Hyper Cacher, then that of the Bataclan the following November, confided: “Talking is important, but you always leave something something about you when you tell again. We have to reopen the wounds, reface it all. » Of course, these documentaries retrace the facts – with a succession of sometimes trying archives to review – and evoke each person’s traumas, but also go beyond them. They highlight what unites these wounded beings. Noémie, present in Hyper Cacher, speaks, like others, of a unique bond. “Gaëlle and I did not experience the same thing: at the Bataclan, she was physically injured, I was not. However, when we talk, we know that we have experienced something similar, that we share the same feelings. Only someone who has been in our situation can understand that. » A “common language” according to another victim, but a singular language because it sometimes does without words.

Make sense

The other common point of the films lies in the narration of the “afterlife”. Even if “we are no longer really alive as before”, believes Riss. Seeking “to put meaning where there is none”, to “do something” with this event, some get involved in community life, commemorations, like Michel Catalano who confronted the assassins of Charlie Hebdo (The test of a life, France 2). Others, like Claude-Emmanuel Triomphe, find a new intensity in their existence. On the side of Charlie Hebdo, work continues, as it did the day after the attack. “Ten years later, it’s miraculous everything we’ve accomplished,” smiles designer Coco. And to hear, in the background Charlie, against all odds (France 2), the bursts of laughter during editorial conferences, the obvious becomes clear: life, without erasing either memories or pain, has foiled the terrorists’ plans.