Robert Badinter, the Minister of Justice who abolished the death penalty in France, dies

Robert Badinter, architect of the abolition of the death penalty in France and moral conscience of the Republic, died on the night of February 8 to 9 in Paris. He was 95 years old. As Minister of Justice under the socialist François Mitterrand, Badinter put an end to the guillotine in 1981, an obsession that, like the defense of human rights and the principles of the Enlightenment, guided the life of this son of Bessarabian Jews who immigrated to France. His father, Simon, was deported by the Nazis to the Sobibor extermination camp, where he was murdered. He, a brilliant student and later a business lawyer who specialized in freedom of the press and defender of murderers sentenced to the guillotine, after his time in the Government he presided over the Constitutional Council and was a senator for the Socialist Party. In this country politically and socially divided and with the extreme right on the rise, he was an atypical personality, almost a monument in life. When he spoke, he was heard.

“He was a figure of the century, a republican conscience, the French spirit,” said President Emmanuel Macron. His old party, the socialist, stated in a statement: “There are few figures with the capacity to unite the nation as a whole, since it means having known how to embody fights that make all of humanity grow. Robert Badinter was one of these.” “He represented a current that goes beyond the parties and that represents what France is,” says former Prime Minister Manuel Valls by phone, close to the couple formed by Robert and the feminist intellectual Elisabeth Badinter. “Disagreements matter little,” said radical left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon. “I have never come across another being of this nature. He was just luminous.” Marine Le Pen, whose program is largely an amendment to Badinter's France, said: “It was possible not to share all of Robert Badinter's struggles, but this man of convictions was unquestionably a figure who marked the intellectual and legal landscape.”

Badinter, like many children of immigrants, and even more so of those who fled racist persecution or authoritarian regimes, appreciated the secular and republican ideal of France in a way that French people with generations of ancestors in this country sometimes do not know how to do. But, as his biographer, Pauline Dreyfus, said, it was “a love story that went thwarted.” In the years of Nazi occupation, during World War II, anti-Semitic and collaborationist France suffered dramatically. But he also found refuge with his mother and brother in a town in Savoy, which allowed them to survive. counted Le Monde in his obituary that the feeling of revolt against injustice arose in him at the end of the war, when a professor of his, whom he had admired, was sentenced to death for collaborating with the Nazis. The professor was finally pardoned, but the young Badinter understood at this moment something that would be essential for him. Revenge is one thing. Another, justice.

There are decisive moments in the life of every human. For Badinter, one was the disappearance of his father. Another, as an adult and as a prestigious lawyer, the defense in 1971 of Roger Bontems, sentenced to death for complicity in the murder of a nurse and a guard during a prison riot. The other convicted person and material author of the events, Claude Buffet, had written to the President of the Republic, Georges Pompidou, asking to be executed and had promised him that, in the event of a pardon, he would return to his old ways. Pompidou rejected a pardon for both Buffet and Bontems, Badinter's client. At dawn, in the Parisian Santé prison, the lawyer heard from the director's office the noise of the knife that decapitated Bontems. In an interview with the weekly Le 1, in 2021, he still remembered that at that moment he thought: “'It's not possible, never again! As long as I can, I will fight against the death penalty. “A justice that kills is not justice.”

A decade would pass before, as Mitterrand's newly minted Minister of Justice, Badinter drafted and defended the law whose first article proclaimed: “The death penalty is abolished.” Previously, he had saved the heads, as a lawyer, of five condemned to the guillotine. The decisive case was that of Patrick Henry, in 1977, sentenced to death for having kidnapped and murdered a child. “I deliberately substituted the death penalty trial for Patrick Henry.” That is, in his final argument, the lawyer did not defend a murderer: he accused the guillotine. He ended like this: “One day, certainly not far off, the death penalty will be abolished in France as is already the case throughout Western Europe. And you will keep your sentence. And one day they will tell their children, or they will find out that a boy has been condemned and they will see their eyes…” Four years later, and despite the fact that 62% of French people were against their project, France was no longer a European exception.

In an interview with EL PAÍS in 2010, Badinter recalled how ending the guillotine against dominant public opinion brought him “the honor of being the most unpopular minister in France.” But it was also then when they began to call him “the honor of the left.” He was not a Marxist but a republican and free-thinking leftist, liberal in the best sense of the word. They say that President Mitterrand used to say: “I have two lawyers. For the right, Badinter. For the crooked, Dumas.” Dumas was Roland Dumas, who would hold several ministries with Mitterrand and embodied the most maneuvering side of Mitterandism, in contrast to Badinter's image of rectitude. As Minister of Justice between 1981 and 1986, he was also responsible for the decriminalization of homosexuality. Until the end he maintained the fight for secularism, against obscurantism and for human rights. In an interview with this newspaper in 2022, days after the massacre carried out by Russian soldiers in the Ukrainian city of Bucha, he said that it was “the moment of truth for international criminal justice and international law.”

“Robert Badinter is the honor of the left and the honor of France,” says Valls. “It is the best of the French republican tradition, of the assimilation of Jews to the most important positions of the Republic, it is this republican aristocracy without title, not a nobility of inheritance, it is one of the last giants of this tradition that goes from Clemenceau and goes through Léon Blum,” he continues, citing figures of republicanism and the left with whom Badinter could be identified. Valls draws a parallel with another figure: Simone Veil, Auschwitz survivor, feminist who achieved the legalization of abortion in France and president of the first elected European Parliament. “Simone Veil came from the right and Robert Badinter from the left,” she says. “They both represent the best of France.” Macron has announced a national tribute to the deceased. A year after she died, in 2018, Veil entered the Pantheon, the temple of secular and republican saints. No one will be surprised if Badinter enters the not-distant future.

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