Robert Badinter, who won the battle to abolish the death penalty in France, dies at the age of 95
Robert Badinter, a French lawyer and former justice minister who led the fight for the abolition of the death penalty in France and became one of the country's most respected intellectual figures, died early Friday. He was 95.
His death was confirmed by Aude Napoli, his spokeswoman.
“Robert Badinter has never stopped advocating the Enlightenment,” said President Emmanuel Macron wrote on social mediaand called him a “figure of the century” who embodied the “French spirit.”
Mr. Badinter was a respected lawyer for decades but was best known for passing the 1981 law that abolished the death penalty in France, one of his very first acts as justice minister in President François Mitterrand's socialist government.
“Thanks to you, tomorrow French justice will no longer be justice that kills,” Mr Badinter told lawmakers in 1981, a fiery, hour-long speech defending the law.
He achieved this despite widespread public support for the death penalty at the time. The fight against the death penalty was at the heart of his lifelong defense of human rights against oppression and cruelty.
In 'The Execution', a 1973 book, he vividly recalled 'the sharp blow' of the guillotine knife when he witnessed the execution of one of his clients, a traumatizing experience which he said led him to campaign against death penalty. Decades later, in a 2010 interview with The New York Times, he still called the guillotine “my old enemy.”
Mr Badinter was Minister of Justice from 1981 to 1986 and then became President of the French Constitutional Council, a position he held for nine years. The council is the institution that reviews laws to ensure they comply with the Constitution. He also served in the Senate as a Socialist MP from 1995 to 2011, gradually coming to resemble the conscience of the republic, a staunch defender of the rule of law.
“Deeply committed to justice, a supporter of abolition, a man of justice and passion, he leaves behind a void that matches his legacy: immeasurable,” Éric Dupond-Moretti, the French Minister of Justice – and himself a long-time lawyer in the defense – said on social media.
Born in Paris, the son of Jewish immigrants from Bessarabia, a region in Eastern Europe that now borders Moldova and Ukraine, Mr. Badinter was raised to respect the liberal values and tolerance of the French republic.
But in 1943, when he was fifteen, his father, Simon, was deported from Lyon and never returned from the Nazi death camps. Several other members of his family, including one of his grandmothers, were also murdered by the Nazis.
The lesson for Mr. Badinter was not that the promises of the republic were empty, but that constant vigilance was necessary to fulfill and defend them. The wartime Vichy government in France, which collaborated with the Nazis in the deportation of Jews, represented the ultimate betrayal of the republic.
Describing himself as “republican, secular and Jewish,” he carried with him for the rest of his long life the mark of the loss of his family during a moment of French betrayal.
“I am French, a French Jew – the two cannot be separated,” he said in 2018. “These are not just words, this is lived reality.”
Mr Badinter had a particularly close relationship with Mr Mitterrand and worked with him to reform the Socialist Party as a centre-left movement that moved away from the large-scale nationalization of industries.
It was to Mr Badinter that Mr Mitterrand turned in 1984 to sign, in strict secrecy, the document in which the President recognized Mazarine Pingeot, his daughter from an adulterous relationship.