More than 4,000 people left a message of condolence on the registers, in honor of Robert Badinter. Some admirers queued for hours, in the rain, to fill out these notebooks made available for several days in the lobby of the Chancellery in Paris.
“Thank you sir,” someone soberly wrote. Others recalled at length the parliamentary debates on the abolition of the death penalty, the decriminalization of homosexuality or Badinter's harangues against anti-Semitism.