DISAPPEARANCE – The great lawyer, a fervent defender of public freedoms, died at the age of 90. A free man, a generous lawyer, an exceptional litigator, he was wary of pompous eloquence which pleases those who practice it but does not necessarily bring happiness to their client.
Lawyer Henri Leclerc died on Saturday, August 31, at the age of 90. The criminal lawyer was born in 1934 to an agnostic tax inspector father, a former Poilu, and a very religious mother. Henri, his brother and their two sisters grew up near Paris, in a house in Sceaux.
He was still a little boy when Pétain, Laval and others like Brasillach were tried. His father – who listened to Radio-Londres during the war – followed these historic hearings through the reports given by the press. The sham of justice that the botched trial of Laval, who was shot already dying, represented in his eyes, infuriated him. Some time later, he gave his son the book by Albert Naud, lawyer of the former head of the collaborationist government, ironically entitled Why I didn’t defend Pierre LavalFunny coincidence: Naud will be Henri Leclerc’s first boss.
Also read: Me Henri Leclerc: “The bar was not my world!”
The latter carried within him from adolescence a hatred of injustice, the death penalty and“Executioner State”. Evoking in his memoirs (1) the end of the Terror, in 1794, he writes thus: « Fouquier-Tinville et Herman [respectivement accusateur public et président du tribunal révolutionnaire] got into the cart in turn. And that doesn’t console me.”He likes the figure of Chauveau-Lagarde, lawyer of Charlotte Corday and Marie-Antoinette.
Passionate about French history
Passionate about French history, which he discovered at Michelet, a passionate reader of Three Musketeersscout, boundless admirer of Victor Hugo in whom he sees the supreme lawyer, Henri Leclerc meets at the faculty of law a certain Michel Rocard. The future co-founder of the National Front, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who with his far-right friends has taken over the “Corpo” (the student office), exchanges a few blows with the future lawyer during a fight.
Henri Leclerc, who had Maurice Thorez’s son as a friend at Lakanal high school, joined the PCF for two years and sold Humanity to the auction, which led to further fights with the opposing camp. He left the party just before Moscow’s intervention in Budapest – ” I was mistaken “he will admit, recalling this brief engagement in the service of the hammer and sickle.
He remained until his last breath a sentimental litigant. A humanist, a pilgrim of the courts, president (1995-2000) then honorary president of the Human Rights League, haunted by the specter of judicial error.
But he remained a left-wing activist throughout his life, lastingly in Rocard’s PSU. One day, on his return from a correctional hearing in Belfort with Robert Badinter (they had defended Edmond Maire, the head of the CFDT, defamed by local communist leaders), his colleague fatalistically whispered to him: “You see, my poor Henri, we are from a generation that will never see the left in power.”. It was 1980, anyone can be wrong.
Before graduating as a lawyer, Henri Leclerc had discovered the assize court as a free auditor. The day he sat on the public benches, a man was being tried “bad guy” who killed to steal and who is condemned by everything. Only his lawyer treats him like a human being. To his soon-to-be-convicted client, he says theatrically to denigrate the pillorying of the criminal: “And if there’s only one left, I’ll be the one!”. Leclerc : “That’s when I felt the tears, and I felt stupid.” (2).
The most human of the dazzling
He remained until his last breath a sentimental litigator. A humanist, a pilgrim of the courts, president (1995-2000) then honorary president of the Human Rights League, haunted by the specter of judicial error – not the one his illustrious colleague Floriot once said in a cynical quip: “This is called an acquittal.”. He did his military service in Algeria, a period during which he never fired a shot but which gave him many opportunities to strengthen his anti-colonialist convictions. However, on his return, Leclerc also intervened for members of the OAS accused before the State Security Court; was not Albert Naud the author of Defend them all ?
The best lawyer is not a magician. When he lost, Henri Leclerc shared his client’s dismay so much that one could have believed that he was the one who was going to prison.
His fame soon grew, although he was still in the shadow of his boss, a conservative bourgeois, a master in every sense of the word, and then a close friend. When he left him to found his own firm, because the time had come for him to fly on his own, he settled like everyone else in the posh neighborhoods, on Avenue Kleber. But Henri Leclerc did not feel comfortable so close to the Arc de Triomphe for long and moved to settle, with his little gang, on Boulevard d’Ornano, in the populous 18th arrondissement of Paris. The cooperative firm became a legendary address near the Simplon metro station for both the profession and the penniless litigants who came there to seek assistance in “fair price”. For good measure, a skinny tomcat is taken in, named not “honoraires” but Misery, which fits better with the spirit of the place.
This is where Leclerc meets Jeanne, a client who wants a divorce. Love at first sight. He marries her once the case is settled. They will have two daughters, Aline and Marie. Henri Leclerc establishes himself in the political tumult of the 1970s as one of the greatest of his generation, alongside Badinter, Kiejman, and then their younger brother Thierry Lévy. Young lawyers crowd into the courtrooms to see them in action. Badinter’s trance against the guillotine, Lévy’s feverish intransigence against prison, Kiejman’s erudite cruelty against everything that resists him, dazzle the audience. Leclerc, on the other hand, is something else. The most human of the dazzling. The most moving of the lords in black robes.
“I forbid you to condemn him to death!”
Under his, he is dressed like a Latin teacher of yesteryear, his bow tie or tie askew, his shoes worn, his suits shabby. Appearance has never been his client. He has no sense of order, gets dirty when he eats, does his hair who knows how. He likes to say that on good days, he pleads with an angel on his shoulder, as if levitating. And what a voice! Deep, thunderous, murmuring, magnificent: listening to him, one thinks one can hear the brassy nuances of a saxophone (tenor, obviously).
At the end of his career, Henri Leclerc played the wise old man, the kind old man who begged with an unfeigned sob “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury” not to hurt an old man close to the grave (himself), while casually dismantling the prosecution’s case. But in his youth, he was a combative lawyer, driven by a rage to convince. “I forbid you to condemn him to death!”he once dared, carried away by his own eloquence, at the Pas-de-Calais assizes – the jurors heard him and spared the man in the dock. This was not always the case: the best lawyers are not magicians. When he lost, Henri Leclerc shared his client’s dismay so much that one could have believed that he was the one who was going to prison.
We will not draw up an exhaustive list here of the exploits of Me Leclerc, who last pleaded in December 2020. Let us mention in 1966 Lucien Léger, known as the “strangler”, sentenced to life imprisonment (he faced the death penalty) for the murder of the little boy, Luc Taron; a wheelbarrow of leftists prosecuted after May-68, including Serge July, future founder of Release ; Guadeloupean independence fighters; the family of « Pierrot » Overney, a Left Proletarian activist killed in 1972 by a security guard in front of the Renault factories in Boulogne-Billancourt – because Henri Leclerc did not refuse on principle to work on the side of the civil party; thugs like “Charlie” Bauer and François Besse, close for a time to Jacques Mesrine, or Roger Knobelspiess; Armenian terrorists from Asala (with, a piquant detail, his colleague and future UMP minister Patrick Devedjian); Iranian protesters; Corsicans; Bretons; Chained Duck; Véronique Courjault (the “frozen babies” affair); law professor Jacques Viguier accused without proof of having killed his wife (fantastic plea in Toulouse in 2009); Florence Rey (the wild escapade in Paris led by her partner Audry Maupin); Dominique de Villepin in the Clearstream affair; Dominique Strauss-Kahn in the Carlton affair in Lille…
One case he often spoke about was particularly close to his heart: that of an anesthesiologist from Poitiers of African origin unjustly accused of having caused the death of a patient to compromise his head of department. The acquittal filled the lawyer, but the distress of the civil parties afflicted him. In the 90s, he found himself alongside Richard Roman, accused of the rape and murder of a little girl, Céline, in La Motte du Caire (Alpes-de-Haute-Provence), which he allegedly committed in the company of a man named Didier Gentil. At the hearing, the latter exonerated Roman, who had nothing to do with the story. The investigation had taken place in a climate of incredible tension. During the reconstruction, Henri Leclerc, the lawyer for the ” monster ” Roman is taken to task, beaten, his shirt is torn off. At that moment, for the whole of France, his swollen face is that of defense and courage.
In the Raddad case, he intervened as a civil party for the family of the victim, Ghislaine Marchal. Facing him, Jacques Vergès, whom he knows well, defended Omar Raddad, the gardener sentenced to 18 years of criminal imprisonment. Some, including colleagues to whom he feels close, criticized Me Leclerc, who had no lessons to receive from these detractors, for having according to them chosen the “wrong” side. He suffered from it for a long time. This nasty trial does not prevent him from remaining a moral reference, a model of ethics for many lawyers, even the most famous, who call him when they are faced with a case of conscience.
A free man, a generous lawyer, an exceptional litigator, he was wary like the plague of pompous eloquence which pleases the person who practices it but does not necessarily bring happiness to his client. Henri Leclerc remained very attached to his Limousin roots: the legend of the bar had accepted the Legion of Honor but kept his feet on the ground. Little by little, his courtroom comrades died, he had become a resigned regular at funeral orations. “I feel like I’m lasting among ghosts”he wrote in his memoirs, which nevertheless ended with these words: “I believe in the morning”.
(1) Words and Actions: The Journey of an Activist LawyerFayard, 2017.
(2) Ibid.
