Because copy editors are independent-minded grammar nerds, and because I’ve been one, and because I haven’t seen this in English anywhere else, I put together what I could find about the copy editor at Charlie Hebdo, Mustapha Ourrad. He was 60 and had been at the paper since 1997. His friend Fabien Soyez says, “He was a leftist and worked for Charlie Hebdo because he believed in their ideal of freedom. He wasn’t the type to work for an employer who didn’t share his humanist values.”
Friends describe him as reserved, erudite, concerned, kind, and funny. Former colleague Christophe Baffier-Candès says he was “toujours pince-sans-rire, et adorable”—always tongue-in-cheek, and adorable.
As a copy editor he was patient and professional. Colleagues praise his “discernment and elegance in his work, his mastery and love of language.” He liked to talk about literature and loved to recite poetry from memory.
Another friend, Elsa Maudet, recalls, “He told me all about the Bateau-Lavoir and the artists who lived there, the banquet organized by Picasso. In the Place Marcel Aymé he stopped in front of the statue of The Man Who Walked Through Walls and retold the whole plot of the story. […] My mother said, ‘When you talked about him you always had stars in your eyes.’”
He had a “hard” childhood in Kabylia, a Berber region of Algeria, and came to France at age 20 in 1974. A hometown friend remembered him as a great reader and brilliant student whose nickname was “Mustapha Baudelaire.” He said of himself that he was not Algerian but Kabylian, not Muslim but a “Sufi atheist.”
He had another gig at a health magazine–the job that paid the bills, I imagine. He wasn’t usually at Charlie Hebdo on Wednesdays—he worked the paper’s Monday close—but was in the office to check a special issue.
He was separated from his wife and had two teenage children.
(Assembled from French, Algerian, and Italian websites and Elsa Maudet’s Twitter feed. The quote from Fabien Soyez is from the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant, The translations are mine, with a little help from Google. The photo is from algerie-focus.com and shows Mustapha Ourrad, or Ourad, with Algerian cartoonist Ghilas Aïnouche at the office of Charlie Hebdo. Reposted from Facebook.)
