To the sound of "Bella Ciao" and "The Women's Hymn", the funeral of lawyer and feminist figure Gisèle Halimi, who died on July 28 at the age of 93, was celebrated on Thursday August 6 at Paris, in the presence of several hundred people.

A large smiling portrait of the deceased was exhibited in front of her coffin, during this secular ceremony organized at the Père-Lachaise crematorium, where her ashes will rest alongside those of her husband Claude Faux.

"You were not only my lawyer, but a big sister".

Gisèle Halimi "is one of those rather rare people who wake us up", declared the philosopher and writer Regis Debray in tribute to the missing lawyer. He said he "understood thanks to her" that the fight for the emancipation of women and that for the emancipation of peoples were one. "She deserves to stay with us as a challenge to all convenience, challenges and laziness," he said.

In addition to two of her three sons, Serge Halimi and Emmanuel Faux, several personalities have followed one another to evoke the memory of this tireless fighter for women's rights, committed lawyer, former member of parliament and author.

Among them, the president of the bar of Paris, Olivier Cousi, the Algerian ambassador to France, Salah Lebdioui, activists of the association "Choose the cause of women" - which she founded with Simone de Beauvoir in 1971 - or again the journalist of Le Monde Annick Cojean, who co-wrote her latest book, "A fierce freedom", expected August 19 in bookstores.

The granddaughter of Djamila Boupacha - an Algerian FLN activist, whom Gisèle Halimi had defended in 1960 by making public the torture and rape she had suffered at the hands of the French soldiers - read a moving message from her grandmother: "You were not only my lawyer, but a big sister".

A place will bear his name in Tunisia

Tunisian President Kais Saied sent a message of sympathy, in which he spoke in particular of Gisèle Halimi's "umbilical" link with her native country. A place will be named after her in Tunis or in La Goulette, a cosmopolitan suburb of the Tunisian capital where she grew up, said a Tunisian diplomat, present at the ceremony.

Entered the crematorium to the sound of "What would I be without you" by Jean Ferrat and Aragon, the coffin came out to the cheers of relatives and anonymous, who shouted: "Thank you" and: "Gisèle Halimi at the Pantheon! ".

"It would be a very very good idea, it has quite its place there, by all the struggles it has led," commented to journalists her friend, Martine Portnoé, who has campaigned alongside her since 1972.

With AFP

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