Bobigny (AFP)

She was already fighting against violence against women when almost no one spoke of feminicide: at 72, the tireless Ernestine Ronai, is a key figure in the lead-up to the Grenelle launched Tuesday.

Little woman in a classic skirt, colorful scarf on the neck, she beats the pavement after each feminicide in Seine-Saint-Denis. To pay homage to "Marie", "Nabila" or "Leila" and "to alert public opinion" on this plague against which she has been active for years behind the scenes.

Tuesday, alongside other associations, she will ask the government to increase the means against this violence. Objective: "one billion" euros.

"I already knew a Grenelle where my means had increased," she says with mischief. "It was in 1968, I had just been appointed as an institute at La Courneuve and our wages had doubled".

School director, then school psychologist, she spent most of her career in Seine-Saint-Denis. But still lives in Paris, Colonel Fabien metro, close to the headquarters of the Communist Party. Inserted at age 13, she advocates for "equality and parity", without immediately becoming aware of domestic violence.

It is during legal permanences at "Femmes solidaires", of which she is the national secretary at the end of the eighties, that she understands she has failed to detect this violence in her previous functions. Simply because of having questioned the victims.

"When I returned to work as a psychologist, I systematically asked the mothers of children with learning difficulties: Are you a victim of violence at home? One in two answered yes."

Training professionals to take the word of women in danger becomes one of its priorities. It will set up, with the Ministry of the Interior, a "frame of hearing" for gendarmes and policemen. "There has been a lot of progress, but there is still work to give women confidence in the security forces."

- "Compass" -

Endless on devices and laws, she keeps her private life secret and does not dwell on her family history. Just drop it that "being a victim, I know what it means".

Born in Paris in the aftermath of the Second World War, she is the daughter of a Polish woman and an Austrian who met in France, where they hid to escape anti-Semitism.

"Our parents gave us the urge to fight for the light to win," says her twin sister, Henriette. She has never seen Ernestine shot, despite the harshness of the situations encountered: "She has the taste to fight to change things and the joy of doing it".

In 2002, the departmental council of Seine-Saint-Denis appealed to her to launch the first departmental Observatory of violence against women, a structure that spread elsewhere in France.

In the field, the actors are "bluffed" by this "big boss", "opinionated" who knows how to train behind his projects.

So prosecutor in Bobigny, François Molins remembers a new partnership. Together, they are looking at feminicide cases "to see what we could have done" so that it does not happen. "She has a lot of inner strength," greets the magistrate, admiring his "expertise almost unmatched on the subject."

For the younger generation, it's a "compass". "Ernestine is one of two, three people I call when I have a doubt," explains Caroline De Haas, of the collective #NousToutes. "It makes you want to be involved, never to relax," said Assia Benziane, 30, elected local in the Paris suburbs and member, like Ernestine Ronai, High Council for Equality between women and men (HCE).

She has passed the retirement age, but continues to travel around France to train professionals. And will make his fifth return to the university degree launched at the University Paris-8 with a judge of the children of Bobigny. Always as a teacher.

Doctors, social workers or magistrates: "We had 18 students at the start, 42 this year," she says with pride. Nice to continue to "make little ones".

© 2019 AFP