Jeannette Bougrab was the girlfriend of Charlie Hebdo’s editor-in-chief Stéphane “Charb” Charbonnier and she spoke out about the murders.
In emotional interviews, 41-year-old Jeannette Bougrab said: ‘I always knew he was going to die like Theo Van Gogh (the Dutch cartoonist murdered in 2004).’
‘I begged him to leave France but he wouldn’t. My companion is dead because he drew in a newspaper.’
Miss Bougrab, who had lived with Charb and her adopted daughter May for three years, added sadly: ‘He never had children because he knew he was going to die. He lived without fear, but he knew he would die.’
Proudly, Bougrab added: ‘He died standing.
‘He defended secularism. He defended the spirit of Voltaire. He, in fact, was really the fruit of this ideal of the Republic that we’ve almost forgotten.
‘He died, executed with his comrades, as he would say.’
Bougrab, a member of the French National Council of State who served under Nicolas Sarkozy’s administration has been described as a ‘hard secularist’.
The daughter of Algerian immigrants she is known as a fierce critic of religion, particularly of Islam.
In interviews, she said that…
‘I am here, not as a former government minister, but as a woman who has lost her man, who has been murdered by barbarians.
‘I admired him before I fell in love with him and I loved him because of the way he was, because he was brave. He thought that life was a small thing when he was defending his ideals.’
‘Then I would like that today that it was explained to me what’s happening in France. And I think some will not pursue the adventure of Charlie [Hebdo] because they are terrified, because they are scared for their lives, because it’s now known that today in France you pick up a pencil and that may kill you. That’s it, that’s France today. I don’t know… We must stop being langue de boi [literally, wooden languange, it refers to speaking in a politically correct and vague way], we must stop and say, today there are policemen, innocents in the streets who died, and people who drew who have been killed in France.’
In the past, Bougrab, a member of the center-right UMP party, had spoken out strongly against Islam.
A French minister said there was no such thing as moderate Islam, calling recent election successes by Islamic parties in Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia “worrying” in an interview published Saturday.
Jeannette Bougrab, a junior minister with responsibility for youth, told Le Parisien newspaper that legislation based on Islamic sharia law “inevitably” imposed restrictions on rights and freedoms.
Bougrab is of Algerian origin, whose father fought on the French colonial side during Algeria’s war of independence, and said she was speaking as “a French woman of Arab origin.”
“It’s very worrying,” she was quoted as saying. “I don’t know of any moderate Islam.”
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