Less than a week after the massacre at its Paris headquarters, a founding member of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo accused the paper's slain editor of provoking the attack and dragging his staff down with him.
The brutal attack last Wednesday left 12 people murdered by Islamist terrorists, including five staff members, among them the editor-in-chief Stephane Charbonnier, known as Charb.
The attack has led to wide support for the paper on the issue of free speech, but Henri Roussel (80), who contributed to the first issue of the satirical weekly in 1970 (when it was known as Hara-Kiri Hebdo), wrote a column this week criticizing Charbonnier for publishing cartoons of the founder of Islam Mohammad.
As a result of one such publication, the magazine's offices were firebombed in 2011.
“What made him feel the need to drag the team into overdoing it?” Roussel wrote in Nouvel Observateur, under his pen name Delfeil de Ton. “He shouldn’t have done it, but Charb did it again a year later, in September 2012.”
“I believe that we [were] fools who took an unnecessary risk. ...That’s it. We think we are invulnerable. For years, decades even, it was a provocation, and then one day the provocation turns against us," he wrote.
“I know it’s not done, (but) I really hold it against you,” added Roussel, who called Charbonnier both an "amazing lad" and a “blockhead."
"Venomous" article
Richard Malka, Charlie Hebdo's longtime lawyer, was infuriated by the column and sent an angry letter to Mathieu Pigasse, one of the owners of Nouvel Observateur and Le Monde.
“Charb has not yet even been buried, and [Nouvel Observateur] finds nothing better to do than publish a polemical and venomous piece on him,” Malka wrote.
“The other day, the editor of Nouvel Observateur, Matthieu Croissandeau, couldn’t shed enough tears to say he would continue the fight. I didn’t know he meant it this way. I refuse to allow myself to be invaded by bad thoughts, but my disappointment is immense.”
Croissandeau responded by saying he thought it was important to publish Roussel’s opinion, despite the outrage it might provoke. “We received this text, and after a debate I decided to publish it in an edition on freedom of expression,” Croissandeau said.
“It would have seemed to me worrisome to have censored his voice, even if it is discordant. Particularly as this is the voice of one of the pioneers of the gang.”
Delfeil has a history of disagreement with the modern Charlie Hebdo, previously accusing Charb's predecessor of turning it into a Zionist and Islamophobic mouthpiece, despite the fact that the paper often aimed its barbs at Jews as well.
He declined to add anything to the statements made in his column. “I have refused to speak to the TV and radio, to everyone. I kept my message for Obs (Nouvel Observateur), and I am not prepared to open this subject again,” he said.
Stephane Charbonnier's funeral will be held Friday in Paris.