A stone’s throw from the Luxembourg Gardens, from the apartment on rue Guynemer which also served as his office, Robert Badinter might see the dome of the Pantheon. Perhaps he sometimes thought that one day, his remains would join those of other famous people. To this immense statesman, who died on the night of February 8 to 9, 2024 at the age of 95, the Nation is in any case preparing to pay a major tribute. Emmanuel Macron, who sees in himself “a figure of the century, a republican conscience”, announced a national ceremony, Wednesday February 14, Place Vendôme, in Paris, where the Ministry of Justice is located.
He was first a hidden child of the Shoah
Both socialist and worldly, with a cold approach but capable of memorable anger, overcome each autumn by a deep melancholy and repeated insomnia, inhabited by a precise and demanding vision of Justice… Robert Badinter was first of all a child hidden from the Shoah. On the wall of his apartment, the only vestige of his father Simon arrested in Lyon in 1943 and exterminated at the Sobibor camp, a modest painting evoking the vanished world of the shtetls. On a shelf, a twisted spoon, picked up full of earth on the site of the Auschwitz camp and inadvertently cleaned by a conscientious cleaning lady (“the sacred earth!”, Badinter was still offended).
Taking refuge with his mother and brother in a village near Chambéry, the future president of the Constitutional Council had to register at high school under a false name. Years later, in 1992, Robert Badinter took the podium, on the occasion of the commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Vel d’Hiv roundup. A few days earlier, François Mitterrand reaffirmed that “Vichy was not France”. The kaddish – the prayer of the dead – has just been recited. In the crowd, boos aimed at the head of state are heard. ” Shut up ! “, shouts Robert Badinter, urging the public to “silence that the dead call”. “I was seized with anger, with fury, thinking of the dead who listen to ushe explained ten years later. How dare we turn a ceremony like that into some kind of miserable political meeting? ».
He remained silent, on the other hand, when in 1994 “A French Youth”, by Pierre Péan, revealed Mitterrand’s connections with the Pétain regime.
Having become a lawyer, he defended Chaplin, Bardot and Coco Chanel
Robert Badinter’s family paid a heavy price in the Shoah. The day following the war, certain that he would never see his father once more – whom he nevertheless came to watch for in vain at the Lutetia hotel more than once – young Robert embarked on brilliant studies in law and literature. and entered the Paris bar in 1951. With Roland Dumas, Georges Kiejman and Jean-Denis Bredin (with whom he set up a business firm), he quickly made a name for himself at the courthouse and counted, among his clients, all the celebrities of the time: Charlie Chaplin, Brigitte Bardot, Vittorio de Sica, Sylvie Vartan, Coco Chanel… At the same time, he gave law courses at the university.
” Defend, assures lawyer Robert Badinter, it is loving to defend, not loving those we defend. » A business lawyer above all, he only appeared in court around twenty times, including seven capital punishment cases in France. In 1972, although he had promised that he would obtain a presidential pardon, he had to attend the execution of his client, Roger Bontems. A huge shock. A deep feeling of guilt. Five years later, he gets his revenge. To save the head of child murderer Patrick Henry, Robert Badinter delivers an anthological pleading. Sweating, foaming at the mouth, in a sort of premonitory trance, he surveys the jurors one by one.
“There are no men on this earth whose guilt is total”
“We will abolish the death penalty, he tells them, and you will be left alone with your verdict, forever. And your children will know that you once sentenced a young man to death. And you will see their look! » In 1981, five months following his appointment as Minister of Justice by François Mitterrand – whom he defended a few years earlier in a defamation case – he found these accents once more to demand from the deputies, at the end of a very long harangue, abolition of the death sentence. “As terrible, as odious as their actions may be, there are no men on this earth whose guilt is total and regarding whom we must always completely despair, he said. Tomorrow, thanks to you, French justice will no longer be a justice that kills. Tomorrow, thanks to you, there will be no more, for our common shame, furtive executions, at dawn, under the black canopy, in French prisons. Tomorrow, the bloody pages of our justice will be turned. »
We know what happened next: despite the fierce opposition of a large part of the right, the reform was adopted by 363 votes to 117. What we know less is the flow of reforms that this tireless guard Sceaux subsequently imposed, in the face of an unleashed right and a public opinion little by little conquered: abolition of exceptional jurisdictions (state security court, permanent armed forces tribunals), decriminalization of homosexuality, referral directly from the European Court of Human Rights or even the abolition of high security units in prisons.
At the Villepinte remand center, he leaves to the ovations of the inmates
The prison. Another big deal, in his eyes. “The prisoners are most often the excluded, the marginalized of the working classes. How might the governing Republicans have transformed the condition of these people when they were so cautious, even timid, in their social policy? Before razing the prison bastilles, they would have had to dismantle many strongholds of social injustice. wrote Robert Badinter in “The Republican Prison”. The word “dignity”, according to him, had its place behind the walls. In 2017, invited by the Villepinte remand center, he spoke regarding Victor Hugo and left to the ovations of the inmates. Until a very advanced age, the prison question continued to torment him.
Appointed by Mitterrand as head of the Constitutional Council, Robert Badinter took advantage of a less busy schedule to write, with his wife Élisabeth – née Bleustein-Blanchet -, “Condorcet, an intellectual in politics”, a biography unanimously praised by the critical. She is a philosopher, he is a man of justice: the Badinter couple were, in the 2000s, two-headed figures of the intellectual left – before Élisabeth Badinter, following controversial statements, particularly on victims of sexual violence, began to be severely criticized by part of the left. Together they have three children, Judith, Simon-Marcel and Benjamin.
Sworn enemy of the death penalty and abusive embayment
In 1995, following 9 years at the head of the Constitutional Council, Robert Badinter returned to the Socialist Party and became senator for Hauts-de-Seine. Until the end of his mandate, in 2011, his long silhouette became familiar to garden regulars. He comes on foot to the Luxembourg Palace, so close to his home. On a small table, protected from the light by a thin glass window, Robert Badinter exhibited to his visitors exceptional documents, gleaned during a lifetime dedicated to justice: an original of the Declaration of Human Rights of 1789, a letter of seal addressed by Louis XIV to the governor of the Bastille, an order from the Sun King governing the use of judicial torture, an arrest warrant signed by Robespierre… Sworn enemy of the death penalty and abusive incarceration, Robert Badinter thus had before his eyes, every day, the very reasons for the struggles of his life.
Robert Badinter is dead and, although he never put on the robe once more following entering politics, entire generations of lawyers will mourn him. With him, it is the soul of justice that we bury. Of human justice, haunted by the fear of judicial error, and convinced that man is not limited to his crime. Of a justice eager to give meaning to the sentence, going so far as to think that prison, from which we always end up emerging, must be a school of citizenship. In 2000, very inspired by these principles, the Minister of Justice Élisabeth Guigou developed the law “reinforcing the protection of the presumption of innocence and the rights of victims”. In the opinion of most professionals, the last justice reform worthy of the name.