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 including five of France’s best-known cartoonists in Wednesday’s attack, the gathering in their temporary office at Libération was an emotional affair.

Laurent Joffrin, Libération’s editor, told the Guardian that about 20 journalists had arrived on Friday morning. He said that disruption to his own paper would be minimal: “They have their own room and all they need to do is to put in computers.”

It was natural for the paper to offer space to the satirical magazine after the “big shock” of the attack, he added. Four other people lost their lives: a maintenance worker who was the first victim of the gunmen, a visitor from Clermont-Ferrand who had come to return cartoons, and two policemen, one a Muslim who was shot in the street.

Joffrin’s deputy, Johan Hufnagel, said the Charlie Hebdo journalists could stay as long as they needed. He asked for the exact location of the team to go unmentioned for security reasons.

Two plainclothes officers stood outside the office where the editorial meeting began at 11.30am and was continuing more than two hours later. Soft drinks and a sandwich lunch were brought in by caterers.

Those at the table included the cartoonist Luz, who escaped the carnage because he was late on Wednesday, reporter Laurent Léger, columnist Patrick Pelloux and the paper’s lawyer, Richard Malka. Asked about the mood as he slipped outside the room, Malka simply said: “We’re organising our work.”

The journalists asked for their privacy to be respected while they worked on next Wednesday’s “special survival” edition, which will be limited to eight pages instead of the usual 16.

A million copies are to be published against its usual 60,000 print run. The magazine’s new editor, Gérard Briard, said next week’s edition “won’t be an obituary. In the next Charlie, they’re not dead.”

In remarks in a video on the Libération website, Briard said: “It will be a normal edition with all the artists of Charlie, all the journalists of Charlie, all the staff – including Mustapha [Ourrad] the copy editor who we never see, they will all be in the paper.” Ourrad was among those who died in the attack.

He also said the journalists intended the edition, which has received an unprecedented amount of funding, to be “normal” and “funny” – “because we don’t know how to do anything else”.

In particular the magazine would strive to demonstrate that “they can’t say they’ve killed Charlie”.

The Libération building, near the Charlie Hebdo premises, is under armed police guard. Visitors are only allowed in with a specific invitation from a staff member and have to leave via the adjacent car park.

Among the visitors on Friday was the French prime minister, Manuel Valls, accompanied by the culture minister, Fleur Pellerin, who has promised €1m (£780,000) to the paper to guarantee its survival. Guardian Media Group has pledged £100,000, while more funding has come from the TV station Canal+ and Le Monde, which has supplied the computers. Although “structural” state grants are given to French media, satirical publications have been excluded until now.

Asked about the irony of the state propping up the deliberately provocative Charlie Hebdo, one Libération staff member said: “It’s normal. This is a democracy.” Journalist Jacky Durand said that welcoming the Charlie Hebdo staff members was “an obvious thing to do. It wasn’t necessary to ask us.”

Libération has had its own shooting attack: in November 2013 a gunman wounded a photographer in the paper’s reception area. “But the context then was completely different from now,” said Durand, referring to the increased sectarian tensions in France and the jihadi threat.

Meanwhile there has been some unhappiness in France that the outpouring of sympathy for the dead journalists defending freedom of expression has overshadowed the other victims. On Thursday, police unions promoted a hashtag #jesuispolicier in solidarity with the two policemen killed, in addition to the #jesuischarlie which has become the global commemorative emblem. Frédéric Boisseau, the 42-year-old maintenance worker who was killed in the Charlie Hebdo reception, was on his first day at work in the building. The married father of two was employed by the Sodexo facilities management company.

Boisseau’s brother Christophe told RTL radio on Friday: “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?”

“They were there at the wrong time in the wrong place. But they should have talked about them all at the same time.”

Christophe Boisseau said he felt resentful against the state which had not been in touch with his family and yet had promised a state funeral for the victims. “I take it that’s going to be only for the five artists, not for the others … I’m angry because they’ve been forgotten.”