“The year 2015 made me understand what collaborationism had been: I was able to observe to what extent intellectual comfort, carnally linked to the survival instinct, drives the most brilliant minds towards complacency and cowardice. Under the facade of education and culture are hidden animals that, as soon as they can, run towards the fullest plate and lick the hands of the master who will hit them less hard. Whether they are university students loaded with diplomas, elegant writers or fashionable debaters, the great idea they have of themselves warrants allowing themselves some betrayals or baseness. Sacrificing someone else's skin to save their own seems logical to them, since they are convinced that they are above everyone. Well, they belong to the dominant race.”
One minute and forty-nine seconds tells a collective story and its ultraviolent instant atomization. It is the intimate and reasoned account of an event that ended up becoming part of the public domain: the terrorist attack against Charlie Hebdo, on January 7, 2015, in retaliation for the publication of cartoons of Muhammad in 2006.
Riss, current director of Charlie Hebdo and seriously injured during the attack, attempts to reappropriate his own destiny and re-inhabit a brutally depopulated life. With a rare intellectual courage, he deals in this book with thinking about his condition as a victim, the unintended consequences of the ideological massacre, the scandal of a re-education that mixes pain, loss, mourning, indignation and rage.