When Robert Badinter, who died at the age of 95, received guests at his home, rue Guynemer (Paris 6th), in his bright office offering a majestic view of the Pantheon and the foliage of the Luxembourg Gardens, he inevitably invited the visitor to a journey into the terrible history of the death penalty.
The former Minister of Justice, architect of its abolition in 1981 - the most memorable measure of François Mitterrand's presidency - kept there, between period furniture and contemporary paintings, a precious wealth of historical documents, some dating from Louis XVI and the Revolution, gleaned from the archives of the Parliaments of yesteryear, in specialized bookstores or in auction rooms.
Like this handwritten letter from Victor Hugo, the author of “Les Miserables” whom he admired so much, also an ardent slayer of this abhorred guillotine.
On September 17, 1981, Robert Badinter, then Minister of Justice, defended his bill on the abolition of the death penalty before the National Assembly.
AFP/Dominique Faget AFP/Dominique Faget
In this intimate museum, the wise old man, with his eyes always sparkling under his bushy eyebrows, extracted from a notebook bound in black leather the piece most dear to his heart: his own abolition law, promulgated on October 9, 1981. A text short written by him, of which he confided, amused, that “only the first article,
the death penalty is abolished
, would have sufficed, the rest being useless”.
And a page covered with five signatures.
In addition to his own, drawn in black Bic, those of President François Mitterrand, Prime Minister Pierre Mauroy and Ministers Gaston Defferre (Interior) and Charles Hernu (Defense).
All gone long before him.
It was Mitterrand, Badinter recounted with emotion, who had had the “delicacy and friendly attention” to give him the text – there are only a handful of copies – thus initialed during this historic Council of Ministers. .
The first secretary of the PS François Mitterrand and the lawyer Robert Badinter during a press conference in 1975.
A humanist icon of the left, like Simone Veil for the right, Robert Badinter shared with the minister who introduced the IVG law a family history marked by the Nazi death camps.
He was born in 1928 in a modest home, to Russian Jewish parents who immigrated from Bessarabia (a territory today shared between Moldova and Ukraine) who launched into the skin trade and swore only by integration into the Republic. .
A family broken by the Shoah
Simon, the father, was arrested by the Gestapo in Lyon (Rhône) in 1943 and deported to Sobibor (Poland).
He won't come back.
Robert, his brother and his mother then took refuge near Chambéry (Savoie), then under Italian occupation.
Registered under a false name at high school, he received a good education without being worried.
Surprisingly, “there was protection of the Jews on the part of the Italian army”, he told the journalist Alberto Toscano (“Ti amo Francia: From Leonardo da Vinci to Pierre Cardin, these Italians who made the France”, Ed. Armand Colin, 14.99 euros).
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The man will remain wounded and stunned by the Shoah for life, and will make it a recurring theme in plays written after his political career.
When recently asked about a return of anti-Semitism, he replied with a bitter smile: “I was 12 years old in 1940, 16 at the end of the Occupation.
Being a Jewish teenager in occupied France does not predispose you to optimism.
»
After the war, Robert Badinter began studying law, was admitted to the Paris bar at the age of 22, began his career under the guidance of a tenor of the time, Me Henry Torres, lawyer for anarchists but also for the Middle East. which instills in him that every accused is above all a man to be defended.
In 1960, the young master Badinter defended the members of the “Jeanson network” – a group of French activists who supported the Algerian separatists –, became a prominent lawyer, and soon founded a successful business firm.
But his great cause is the fight against the death penalty.
“We were the last country in Western Europe to practice it, we have a culture of violence”, confided to us, during an interview at the height of the Yellow Vests crisis (some of which were carrying around the head of President Macron in effigy on the end of a pike), the one who considered Gandhi, champion of non-violence, to be “the greatest statesman of the 20th century”.
A passionate speaker, seeming "in a trance" in his pleadings, he often evoked, his voice still vibrating, the trials of Buffet and Bontems in 1972 - who ended in the guillotine - or of Patrick Henry in 1977 - whose head he saved - with the atmosphere of “hate” and the cries of “death!”
» crowds around the assize courts in the provinces.
An intellectual figure more than political
It was as an intellectual, professor of law at the university, that he became involved in politics.
First with Pierre Mendès France, then at the PS of François Mitterrand for whom he wrote notes.
With regard to the socialist president, who kept his promise of abolition despite polls showing a majority of opinion attached to capital punishment, Badinter's loyalty is unwavering.
To the point that he will always refuse to publicly judge the dark friendship of the sphynx Mitterrand with René Bousquet, Pétain's former police chief.
“It’s nobody’s business,” he replied to us
off
-screen one day , annoyed.
We explained this
(Editor's note: with François Mitterrand)
, and I know, upon investigation, that he only knew Bousquet after his acquittal
(by the High Court of Justice, in 1948)
, not before.
In any case, they did not hang out at Vichy.
»
Robert Badinter at home in January 2020. LP/Olivier Arandel
The rigorous and somewhat cold jurist was never really at ease in a sometimes brutal political world.
President of the Constitutional Council from 1986 to 1995, then senator until 2011, he wrote a lot - theater, historical biographies, legal works -, once in tandem with his wife, Élisabeth Badinter.
Having become a wise man consulted by politicians, he saw his successors parade through his home at Place Vendôme, coming to pledge allegiance.
Despite his increasingly frail physique, he stood straight as an “i”, put his jacket and tie back on in front of the photographer: “I am against old gentlemen without ties!
»