A divided France divides over a national hero
At a solemn ceremony on Wednesday, France paid its respects to Robert Badinter, the lawyer and former justice minister who came to represent the nation's conscience, but sharp political conflict marred any show of unity.
The family of Mr Badinter, a lifelong socialist who led the campaign that resulted in the abolition of the death penalty in France in 1981, demanded that neither Marine Le Pen's far-right National Rally Party nor the far-left France Unbowed party, founded by Jean- Luc Mélenchon, may attend the ceremony. Mr Badinter died on Friday.
Together, the two parties hold about 30 percent of the seats in the National Assembly, or the lower house of parliament. A ceremony intended to celebrate one man's embodiment of the soul of France instead revealed a divided country whose identity and essential values are in dispute.
Ms Le Pen's National Rally, formerly the National Front, has embraced many of the positions Mr Badinter most abhors – anti-Semitism, xenophobia, rejection of European unity – thus the request of Mr Badinter's widow, Élisabeth Badinter , was perhaps predictable. The party duly respected her wishes.
But the sharp rebuke to Mr Mélenchon, who as a fellow socialist served for many years in the Senate with Mr Badinter, was a clear indication of the fragmentation of the left in France and the eclipse of moderate social democratic views by the former Minister of Justice. The Socialist Party has been in steep decline since Emmanuel Macron, a centrist, upended traditional views and became president in 2017.
Mr Mélenchon, who as a candidate of France Unbowed came third in the first round of voting for the presidency in 2022, did not react well.
“A national tribute from which part of the French people is excluded is not a national tribute,” he said on X, formerly Twitter. “The Republic is one and indivisible.”
The party insisted on sending two senior representatives to the ceremony against Ms Badinter's wishes, but Mr Mélenchon did not attend. Sabrina Agresti-Roubache, a young member of France's centrist government, denounced the party's presence as a show of “an absolute lack of decency.”
Mr Badinter's coffin, draped in the French flag, was carried to Place Vendôme in central Paris by six uniformed members of the Republican Guard as President Macron looked on. The location, which had never been used for such a ceremony, was chosen because Mr Badinter worked on the square for five years when he was justice minister.
“He was a soul that cried out, a force that lives and saves life from the hands of death,” Macron said.
It was on September 17, 1981 that Mr Badinter thundered before Parliament in words that have marked French history: “I have the honor to demand, in the name of the Government of the Republic, the abolition of the death penalty in France. .” At that time, executions were still carried out by guillotine, as had been the case since the French Revolution.
Mr. Badinter, whose father was deported from Lyon, France, to a Nazi death camp in 1943 and never returned, parted ways with Mr. Mélenchon over what he viewed as France Unbowed's extremist positions.
He was particularly concerned about the flirtation with political Islam, which has attracted strong support for France Unbowed in poor suburbs with large Muslim populations of mainly North African descent.
“I never thought anti-Semitism would go away, never,” Mr Badinter told Challenges magazine last year. “I always thought it would come back in some form. Political Islam is one variant, and not a new one. What worries me is this alliance between political Islam and a part of the left, a left that is looking for a new proletariat, as most workers now vote for the National Rally and Le Pen.”
This variant of the left – that of Mr Mélenchon – had turned away from the Enlightenment and embraced universalism and forms of identity politics, Mr Badinter argued.
His widow, a philosopher, was more blunt. Ms. Badinter told L'Express, a weekly magazine, last year that Mr. Mélenchon's France Unbowed bears an “enormous” responsibility for the rise of anti-Semitism. The party had encouraged “the worst in an entire sector of our youth” by portraying France's Muslims as “the victims par excellence of our society”, she said.
Mr Mélenchon has denied any suggestion that he is an anti-Semite, an accusation leveled at his party by Élisabeth Borne, the former prime minister, after it equivocated on the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, in which both sides played equally were blamed for the violence.
Mr. Mélenchon has since argued that Israel's military response in Gaza “is not self-defense, but genocide,” as he put it last year in Orient XX1, an online magazine aimed at the Arab and Islamic world.
Mr Macron vowed to remain faithful to Mr Badinter's “lessons and commitment”, while denouncing anti-Semites, Holocaust deniers and “those who threaten the rule of law”. He suggested that he would be in favor of Mr. Badinter's inclusion in the Panthéon, the sacred tomb of the country's heroes.