1966. How does a couple begin?
That year, Robert Badinter was single.
A lawyer, recently divorced, he obtained his private law aggregation a year earlier and, among his clients, is a renowned advertising executive, Marcel Bleustein-Blanchet and his agency, Publicis.
It is on his client's property that the lawyer meets Elisabeth, 22 years old, daughter of Marcel, younger than him by sixteen years and whose concerns are not, a priori, exactly those of her future husband: Elisabeth Bleustein, former student of the Alsatian School, studied philosophy of which she was a graduate and which she taught, notably at the École Polytechnique from 1978. However, between them, between law and philosophy, it is undoubtedly the spirit of Enlightenment and tolerance which serves as an elective affinity.
The couple married on July 1, 1966 and had three children, Judith, Simon and Benjamin.
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In 2017, Elisabeth Badinter declared to
Philosophie Magazine
that her passion for the Enlightenment and its century arrived very early: “It was born in the first year of university when I discovered Rousseau.
I must say that it was love at first sight: I was amazed by his writing and his intellectual audacity.”
Noted teachers
What also unites them is a faith in teaching: both will be noted teachers.
Above all, in terms of intellectual audacity, the Badinter couple seems to have built themselves on the social advances of the eras they lived through.
She first of all, through her work and research, her books and her interventions, builds the canvas of a certain French feminism, laying in the 1970s and 1980s, the foundations of a reflection on gender, sexuality and the difference between the sexes, exploring the clichés linked to the feminine and motherhood in order to move away from them: her book
L'Amour en plus
, published in 1980, was a great bookstore success, selling 400,000 copies.
Since then, each of his works has been eagerly awaited.
Following in the footsteps of Simone de Beauvoir, Elisabeth Badinter develops secular feminism.
Secularism will also be the determining thread of her thoughts and actions, just as it will have been at the heart of her husband's thoughts and actions.
Elisabeth and Robert Badinter on the set of the show “Apostrophes”, March 1988. Getty Images
As if echoing Elisabeth's thoughts, resolutely oriented towards a change in the matrices of society, that of Robert Badinter is located in the same territory.
A lawyer, he is convinced that the death penalty must be abolished and in 1977 he managed to save the cold Patrick Henry, the murderer of a 7-year-old child, from capital punishment.
He does so in the face of a society that demands the assassin's head: Badinter's victory is first and foremost that of a society over itself.
Or rather that of an era which seeks mutation, change, 10 years after May 1968.
Everyone on their own floor
This is undoubtedly how their couple has spanned the years and the century, even if they each lived on their own floor, in their apartment on the outskirts of the Luxembourg Gardens district: together, they carried out founding battles for generations which followed.
Feminism, commitment, justice.
However, as a couple, they encouraged discretion.
Their only common work, beyond the community of their fights, was a single book dating from 1988, a four-handed biography of Condorcet.
What did they both find in common in the figure of this 18th century man, mathematician and philosopher?
No doubt the genius of the Enlightenment that they both loved so much.
Unless Condorcet was an ideal synthesis of all their areas of research and interest.
Combat
Guest on Bernard Pivot's "Apostrophes" show, Elisabeth Badinter admits that it was she who introduced Condorcet into their shared history, arguing that he is "the most beautiful and radical of feminists."
To which Robert Badinter responded about the common interest and the desire to write together: “The question was how and where to find us?
(…) As I progressed in my knowledge of Condorcet, it was profoundly the man who fought injustice.”
Fighting: this is the word that seems to best define this couple, and their journey through the century, as if, by intellectualizing their relationship around the notion of justice, by working together but at a distance, they had built something of the ideal couple – one that does not fade, and lasts beyond its time.