Four months on, staff are still dealing with emotional trauma as well as wrangles over the donations that flooded in from around the world

Through a chink in the wall of heavily armed, plainclothes police who chaperone him round the clock, the cartoonist Riss sighs and says that mentally, he is doing “OK”.

The 48-year-old, known for his caricatures of Nicolas Sarkozy, has taken on the role of editor of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo after surviving the gun attack on its editorial meeting on 7 January that killed 12 and sparked three days of terror that left five more dead in a kosher supermarket siege. But four months later, he is at the centre of a different emotional storm amid disagreements between staff and management over what to do with the donations that have poured in from across the world, and the €12m in profits made by a paper only recently on the brink of bankruptcy.

With a sudden hero status as a French national treasure, Charlie Hebdo’s burden of reinventing itself is proving agonising after eight staff were shot, including some of France’s best-known cartoonists, Charb, Cabu, Wolinski, Honoré and Tignous. The well-known cartoonist Luz, who survived because he had a hangover and was late for the editorial meeting, has announced he will leave in September, saying every issue produced without his dead friends and colleagues is a “torture”. The knot in his stomach is so big that he has given it the pet name “Ginette” and this week released a book of drawings about it.

Meanwhile, staff resolutely work on in a heavily protected temporary office on a floor of the French daily, Libération, coming to work between flashbacks and psychotherapy appointments, comforting the relatives of the dead and visiting the three survivors who are still in hospital being treated for horrific injuries. In a small team of about 20 people, the slightest spat now plays out in public under a full media spotlight – including staff demands to turn the paper into a co-operative and criticisms of management’s treatment of those suffering the fallout of death threats and grief.

“The atmosphere is appalling,” one journalist says. But all acknowledge that each Wednesday morning on the attack’s anniversary they manage to sit around the editorial conference table, put bad feeling aside, and come up with a good paper.

“The most important thing is there’s a real desire to keep getting this paper out every week, it should continue and it will continue,” says Riss (real name: Laurent Sourisseau). “Yes, we’re in a very peculiar situation, but you just mustn’t think about it too much. The fact that everyone is watching across the world spurs us on to keep going, helps us not be scared.” Under fatwa himself after 20 years at Charlie Hebdo, there were reports this week that police had questioned two suspects for photographing the building where he lives. On the day of the January attack, he ducked while the others stayed standing, a bullet shattered his shoulder-blade – likened by doctors to “a plate smashed against the ground” – and he was left haunted by watching his friends being gunned down. In hospital, he thought the gunmen would come back to find him and finish him off. “Everyone handles it differently,” he says. “Physically, I’m better than I have been.”

Central to current tensions in Charlie Hebdo is the money many staff describe as the “poisoned millions”. Since the attacks, the paper has received €4.3m from 36,000 donors in 84 countries. The French state gave €1m, Google gave €250,000, the Guardian Media Group gave £100,000.

Charlie Hebdo: one of Laurent ‘Riss’ Sourisseau’s covers

In parallel, increased sales have boosted the profits of the ad-free magazine. Before the attack, Charlie Hebdo had a print run of between 24,000 and 50,000 copies a week. But its “survivors’ edition” published after the attacks sold 8m copies and weekly sales are expected to stabilise at at least 100,000. It now has 200,000 pre-paid subscribers, compared with 8,000 before the attacks, and sales profits since January stand at around €12m before tax.

But a collective of more than half the staff, including Luz, recently published a piece in Le Monde asking for total transparency in how the money is used and demanding the paper be transformed into a co-operative. The management has vowed that the donations will be distributed, via an independent panel, to the families of the victims of all the January attacks,including the kosher grocery attack. Meanwhile, profits would be ploughed back into the paper. But Riss has brushed aside a co-operative model and no decisions on the paper’s future will be taken until September.

Charlie Hebdo is currently 40% owned by Riss, dating back to an arrangement at a time when shares were virtually worthless; 40% is owned by the parents of former editor Charb, who have inherited his portion; and 20% is owned by managing editor Eric Portheault. There are bitter memories of 2006, when the paper’s issue featuring the Muhammad cartoons sold 500,000 copies and the previous editorial shareholders quietly took home six-figure dividends, infuriating the rest of the staff.



Another challenge is how to redesign and reinvent the paper digitally and in print, and encourage a new generation of cartoonists — the paper has struggled to fill the huge gap left by the household-name cartoonists who were killed. Younger artists prefer the safer and more lucrative world of French bande dessinée books, graphic novels and illustrations

Laurent Léger, the Charlie Hebdo investigative journalist, who survived the January attack and signed the collective’s appeal for transparency, says: “I am amazingly lucky to be alive so I can’t complain. But I’m worn out and tired, and I’m also bitter that the management is taking so long to understand the absolute necessity of restructuring the paper and the way it is run.” He adds: “My dream is a publication that is really created collectively, that is younger, with a more modern type of satire, just as political as ever but with more focus on culture. I’m confident in our future, because little steps have been taken towards making it more collective. Clearly not enough, so we have to stay vigilant.”

There was outrage last week over management’s treatment of Zineb El Rhazoui, the Moroccan-French sociologist and writer, who is living in virtual hiding after death threats. She was summoned for an interview in a process that could have led to her sacking over alleged failure to file her articles on time and attend editorial meetings since the attacks. She believed she was being punished for signing the appeal for a co-operative and for “having a big mouth”. Management has since backed down. El Rhazoui says: “Like many of my colleagues, I’m shocked and very sad to see things going badly at Charlie Hebdo. There seems to be an authoritarianism, things are impersonal and opaque.” Her husband had lost his job and had to leave Morocco due to threats from fundamentalists. Now forced to “move every two or three days, between people’s spare rooms, friends’ sofas or hotel rooms”, she finds the atmosphere at the paper “unbearable”, nothing like the “jokey, good-natured” mood before the attacks.

The news grind continues but access can be harder. Solène Chalvon, a reporter, says: “What’s very difficult as a journalist is that there are subjects you’d like to report on but where you come up against people who marched [in the commemoration rally] on 11 January, and said ‘I am Charlie’, and who now when you ask if you can come in to report, say ‘no you can’t report here’ because of security concerns. For example, high schools, abortion clinics, prisons, particularly state institutions. It makes work very difficult.”

“We’re not heroes and we never wanted to be,” Luz told Libération, about the dreadful strain of working since the attacks. At the Libération offices, where Charlie Hebdo also took shelter after a firebomb wrecked their offices in 2011, the staff feel they have been put up well and helped. “The conditions are good, we see other journalists,” says one staff member. “But when we move and it’s only us on our own, I’m more scared. That’s why any differences among staff have to be resolved now.”