Robert Badinter, a French lawyer and former justice minister who led the fight to abolish the death penalty in France and became one of the country’s most respected intellectual figures, died early Friday. It was 95.
His death was confirmed by Aude Napoli, his representative. He did not say where he died.
“It’s a litmus test for many generations,” President Emmanuel Macron told reporters during a visit to Bordeaux on Friday, hailing Mr Banditer as a “wise man” and a “conscience” for France.
“The nation owes him a lot,” Mr Macron said, adding that the government would hold a national tribute.
Mr Badinter spent decades as a respected defense lawyer, but was best known for introducing the 1981 law that abolished the death penalty in France, one of his first acts as justice minister in the Socialist government of President François Mitterrand.
“Tomorrow, thanks to you, the justice of France will no longer be a justice that kills,” Mr. Badinter told lawmakers in 1981 in a fiery, hours-long speech defending the law.
He accomplished this in the face of widespread public support for the death penalty at the time. The fight against the death penalty was at the core of a lifelong defense of human rights against oppression and cruelty. It was also under Mr. Badinter’s watch, in 1982, that France decriminalized homosexuality.
In “The Execution,” a 1973 book, he vividly recalled “the sharp snap” of the guillotine blade as he witnessed the execution of one of his clients, a prisoner sentenced to death for complicity in the murder of a guard and a nurse after a hostage in prison.
This traumatic experience led Mr. Badinter to crusade against the death penalty. Decades later, in a 2010 New York Times interview, he still referred to the guillotine as “my old nemesis.”
Mr. Badinter was justice minister from 1981 to 1986 and then became president of France’s Constitutional Council, a post he held for nine years. The council is the body that reviews laws to ensure they comply with the Constitution.
He also served in the Senate as a socialist lawmaker from 1995 to 2011, and for many, especially on the left, he gradually came to resemble the conscience of democracy, a staunch defender of the rule of law.
“Deeply committed to justice, an abolitionist, a man of law and passion, he leaves a void that matches his legacy: immeasurable,” said Éric Dupond-Moretti, France’s justice minister — and himself a longtime defense lawyer . he said on social media.
Mr Dupond-Moretti later announced that the Ministry of Justice would exceptionally be open to the public until Sunday, allowing people to sign a book of condolences.
Robert Badinder was born on March 30, 1928 in Paris to Jewish immigrants from Bessarabia, a region in Eastern Europe that today straddles Moldova and Ukraine. He was raised to respect the liberal values and tolerance of French democracy.
But in 1943, when he was 15, his father, Simon, was deported from Lyon and never returned from the Nazi death camps. Many other members of his family, including one of his grandmothers, were also killed by the Nazis.
The lesson for Mr. Badinter was not that the promises of democracy were empty, but that constant vigilance was needed to honor and defend them. The Vichy government in wartime France that collaborated with the Nazis in deporting the Jews was the ultimate betrayal of democracy.
Defining himself as “republican, secular and Jewish”, he carried within him for the rest of his long life the mark of the loss of his family in a moment of French betrayal.
“I am French, French-Jewish – the two cannot be separated,” he told Le Monde in 2018. “These are not just words, this is the lived reality.”
Mr. Badinter and other family members fled to a small town in the French Alps, where the residents had taken refuge. After the war he studied literature and law in Paris and received a Master of Arts from Columbia University in New York. He began his career as a lawyer in 1951 and later, while teaching university courses, fought to help several convicts avoid the death penalty.
As justice minister, Mr Badinter abolished special courts that operated outside the normal framework of the law – such as one that tried only crimes against the state – and voted for reforms to improve prison conditions, even as opponents of the right and of the far Right accused him of being too lenient with criminals.
Mr Badinter was part of a government that reformed the Socialist Party as a centre-left movement and abandoned the wholesale nationalization of industries, but his death comes at a time when the country has drifted to the right and the party’s influence has been radically reduced.
He was particularly close to Mr. Mitterrand, who turned to Mr. Banditer in 1984 to co-sign, in utmost secrecy, the document in which the president recognized Mazarine Pingeot, his daughter from an adulterous relationship.
Mr. Badinter’s first marriage was to Anne Vernon, a French actress. He is survived by his second wife, Élisabeth Banditer, a French philosopher and writer who is vice-chairman of the supervisory board of Publicis, an advertising and public relations firm, and their three children.
To the end, Mr. Badinter pushed France to assume its responsibilities in the quest for global human dignity and peace. In his last interview, 10 months ago, he referred to the conflict in Ukraine, telling France Inter radio, “We French people don’t realize enough that there is a war in Europe.”
