The carnage inside Charlie Hebdo: an eyewitness’s account of the attack

It is almost five years since two trained jihadists went into the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris and killed 12 people. Philippe Lançon survived the editorial meeting that was taking place as the gunmen burst in. Published to huge acclaim in France last year, Disturbance is his account of events. It is long, perhaps too long, with numerous discursions. But who would edit such painful, painstaking testimony?

On the morning of the attack, Lançon had been weighing up whether to go to Charlie or to Libération, where he also worked. He chose to go to Charlie, whose difficult, brilliant, brave team had kept producing the magazine, despite a decade of growing attention from Europe’s modern-day blasphemy police. Lançon describes these editorial meetings, where ‘words ran like hungry dogs from one mouth and body to another’ and writers and artists used humour as ‘a guide, an outlet, and a corrosive’.

Over the decades, Charlie had taken aim at everything.