The former French justice minister Robert Badinter will have his name written in the Panthéon, the resting place of the nation’s greats, Emmanuel Macron has said, amid an outpouring of national grief over the death of the lawyer who fought to ban capital punishment in France.
Macron told a memorial ceremony on Wednesday that Badinter, who died aged 95, had been the “moral conscience” of the nation.
Thousands of people turned out to commemorate Badinter’s work and legacy, which transformed the justice system. The work included ending the death penalty and scrapping a law that discriminated against same-sex relationships on the age of consent.
He considered one of his most important measures to be allowing individuals to bring cases before the European court of human rights. He also fought for prison reform. He was a voice against hatred after his Jewish father and many relatives were rounded up in France and killed in Nazi concentration camps.
Macron promised to be faithful to Badinter’s ideas of humanism at a time when “forgetting and hatred seem to be growing again”.
Le Monde said the mourning and recognition for Badinter came because he had fought to make real and write into law the ideals of rights and justice. The paper said there was an increased awareness today that such rights could not be taken for granted.
In 1981, Badinter went against public opinion to push through legislation banning capital punishment, which at the time was carried out by beheading with the guillotine, a practice dating back to the French Revolution of 1789. He was widely vilified at a time when most French people still supported the death penalty. “Guillotining is nothing less than taking a living man and cutting him in two,” Badinter had argued as a defence lawyer.
Badinter was born in Paris in 1928 to Jewish parents who had immigrated from Bessarabia, now Moldova. In 1943 his father was among many Jewish people rounded up by the Gestapo in the south-eastern city of Lyon and deported to the Sobibor concentration camp in modern-day Poland, where he was killed in the gas chambers. Many of Badinter’s other relatives were also deported and killed. Badinter, his mother and brother sheltered in a village in the French Alps for the rest of the war.
In 1983, Badinter succeeded in making Bolivia extradite to France Klaus Barbie, a former chief of the Gestapo, the Nazis’ secret police. Known as the “butcher of Lyon”, Barbie was put on trial for crimes against humanity and sentenced to life imprisonment in a landmark case during which Holocaust survivors took the stand for the first time in France.
At the justice ministry in Paris, thousands have queued to write in a condolences book. Gaëlle Le Breton, 55, a lawyer, had come to pay her respects. She said Badinter had inspired her to study law as a teenager. “He was an extraordinary human being who saw the human flame in everyone and thought everyone should have the chance to be better whatever they had done,” she said.
She wrote in the condolences book: “You were our conscience, our confidence, our inspiration, our final reference. May your aspiration for a better world, your fight to preserve that right for everyone, your struggle for that right to be better that was so dear to you and made you so extraordinarily human, animate us for ever.”
Catherine Prevost-Meyniac, 54, an economics and eco-management professor from Angers, had travelled to Paris to sign the condolences book and attend the memorial ceremony. She said: “I was 12 years old when he gave his speech at the national assembly [calling for the abolition of the death penalty] and I remember it was the first time I saw my father cry. I also had the right to a glass of champagne. Then when I became a law student in Paris I had him as a professor and attended his extraordinary classes and even took an oral exam with him. And it wasn’t just the death penalty. He also decriminalised homosexuality and dismantled the special courts. His conviction, humanism, rigour, patience and his anger at injustice were unwavering.”
Her daughter Victorine, 25, an archivist, said: “France was very late to abolish the death penalty and it was Robert Badinter who argued for another kind of republic. Even those of us who weren’t alive in 1981 know of his battle to end the death penalty and have seen his very powerful speeches. He was an exceptional man. Above and beyond politics he was a man who embodied humanist values, and he fought to the end to defend these values for all French citizens. This is relevant even today when we see the rise of the extreme right in France and Europe. He was a great man, a great human and he fought a long battle. We cannot go backwards.”
Bruno Chesné, 75, a retired architect from Paris, said: “There is nobody of his stature around today. This kind of person no longer exists. Like him, I am on the left, so we are in the same political court. I respected his way of doing things, the fact that he took a position and he saw it through.”
