The cartoonist and survivor of the November 13 attacks, Fred Dewilde committed suicide this Sunday, May 5. After the attack, he published several books and regularly testified in schools.
“November 13 finally caught up with him.” Fred Dewilde was at the Eagles of Death Metal concert at the Bataclan on November 13, 2015, when his life changed. Survivor of the attacks of November 13, 2015 in Paris, the cartoonist and member of the victim assistance association Life For Paris, ended his life this Sunday, May 5, the association announced on X (formerly Twitter) . “Since that fatal evening of November 13, 2015, he said that a part of him was dead,” assured his family in a press release shared by the association. Nearly nine years after the attack which left at least 129 dead and 352 injured in the concert hall, he ended his life at the age of 58.
“His immense appetite for life, his poignant works and his projects full of drawers were cut down in one night by an insurmountable suicidal impulse making him deaf to any future,” continues the family of Fred Dewilde. “They killed him a second time, without more than a second chance of ‘survival’. Fred will no longer enlighten us with his frank smile, the warmth of his affection, his grand gestures which punctuated his slow phrasing”, adds his family. “In this world full of conflict, his legacy is a fight. Soldier Fred fell today and we are his heirs,” the statement concluded.
Father of three children, Fred Dewilde recounted how he had lost everything from his previous life. Declared unfit, he lost his job, his house, then his partner. He gave his testimony a year later in a comic book entitled Mon Bataclan (Lemieux). Over the course of 22 pages, the author recounted his ordeal against a black and white drawing background. A way for him to begin his slow reconstruction despite his anxieties and his post-traumatic syndrome. “When I started to redraw after the Bataclan, it was to draw the scenes in the pit. It’s an outlet, a psychoanalysis,” he assured Le Parisien in 2021.
