A journalist stroked the arm of a colleague to comfort her. Others whispered into mobile phones as they sat at a table for their first editorial meeting in new premises.
For the staff of Charlie Hebdo, which lost eight journalists in Wednesday's attack, yesterday's gathering in their temporary office at Libération was an emotional affair.The journalists asked for their privacy to be respected while they worked on next Wednesday's "special survival" edition, which will be eight pages instead of the usual 16. A million copies are to be printed, a huge increase on its usual 60,000 print run.
The Libération building, located close to the Charlie Hebdo premises, is now under armed police guard. Among the visitors yesterday were prime minister Manuel Valls and culture minister Fleur Pellerin, who has promised €1 million to the paper to guarantee its survival.
Asked about the irony of the state propping up the provocative Charlie Hebdo, one Libération staffer said: "It's normal, this is a democracy."
There has been some unhappiness in France that the outpouring of sympathy for the dead journalists has overshadowed the other four who were killed: a maintenance worker, a visitor who had come to return some cartoons and two policemen, one of them a Muslim.
Christophe Boisseau, brother of the maintenance worker Frederic, told RTL radio: "When I hear on the TV, 'we're thinking of the victims', people think of the well-known victims. But it wasn't just them, there were 12. You only hear talk of five. Who were the others? Collateral damage?"–(Guardian service)
