The legendary lawyer's robe hung in her apartment until the end, for more than seventy years, as if she wanted to put it on again at any moment.

Gisèle Halimi, hardly known in Germany, was one of the great pioneers of equal rights in France, along with Simone de Beauvoir and Simone Veil.

One of her best-known and most momentous actions to this day is the "Manifesto of the 343" organized together with Beauvoir, published on April 5, 1971 in the weekly magazine "Nouvel Observateur", in which 343 women, celebrities such as Catherine Deneuve or Marguerite Duras, but also many Unknowns known by name to have had the abortion.

Through the mediation of Alice Schwarzer, the "Stern" took over the campaign in Germany a few months later, a date

In a volume of conversations with the "Le Monde" journalist Annick Cojean, which was published in France a few weeks after Halimi's death in July 2020 and is now available in a German translation, Halimi talks about her big cases in an unbroken committed tone, but also about her personal motivation return.

She was born in 1927 in what was then the French protectorate of Tunisia, her mother was a Sephardic Jew and her father was a Berber.

Halimi finds the key to her lifelong struggle against injustice in her childhood.

According to the family saga, it took three weeks before her father finally announced her birth to his friends, he was so ashamed that his wife had only given birth to a girl.

When Halimi was ten years old, she went on a hunger strike and refused to continue serving her brothers at the table.

Between Algeria and Paris

She found the way out of the predetermined path into an arranged marriage and her dependence on a man, for which her mother was a deterrent example, in reading and learning.

In fact, she became a brilliant student and finally got permission to study in Paris in 1945.

She returned to Tunisia just four years later, with a degree in philosophy, a law degree and a license to practice law in her pocket – and the absolute will to assert herself in the male world of justice.

So she reports how she worked through the nights, polished her rhetoric and, what's more, for a long time dressed as unimpressively as possible to make herself invisible as a woman.

Halimi's early years as a lawyer were shaped by the colonial independence movement in North Africa.

In 1953 she was involved as a defense attorney in her first major political trial, in which the killing of three French police officers in the Tunisian town of Moknine by demonstrators was negotiated.

From 1956 until Algerian independence in 1962, Halimi commuted back and forth between Algeria and Paris, where she now lived with her first two sons after separating from her husband.

She speaks of her commitment with almost existential pathos: “It was primarily about a people demanding their freedom.

I am not so receptive to any other topic.”

She tells amazingly cold-blooded

One case in particular became a symbol of the cruelty of French special forces: the trial of young FLN activist Djamila Boupacha, who was raped and brutally tortured in detention.

Halimi took on her defense with the clear intention of turning the trial into a tribunal about war crimes and the arbitrariness of the French judiciary in Algeria.

She convinced Beauvoir to devote her column in "Le Monde" to the case: On June 2, 1960, the article "For Djamila Boupacha" was published, which led to a sensational initiative by numerous intellectuals and artists such as Françoise Sagan and Pablo Picasso.

Halimi sometimes recounts all of these experiences with surprising cold blood – about the death threats she received, about her visit to the headquarters of the Supreme Commander of Algiers, General Massu, or about her own arrest by his notorious paratroopers, who held her in Algerian prisons for months without that it was agreed whether she would survive the imprisonment unscathed.

More personal are her memories of Simone de Beauvoir, who fascinated her as an intellectual but whose coldness frightened her, and above all those of Jean-Paul Sartre, whom she experienced as the exact opposite and whom she loved "like a father".

After the end of the Algerian War, Halimi increasingly focused on her feminist engagement.

Trials with great public mobilization became her trademark, such as the 1972 Bobigny trial, in which she defended a girl who, with the help of her mother, had had an abortion after being raped.

Individual cases became outright campaigns to initiate legislative changes, as was the case in 1974 with the legalization of abortion by the "loi Veil".

As a politician, however, Halimi was not able to build on her successes as a lawyer.

On July 2, 1981, she moved into the Palais Bourbon as a non-party MP after Mitterrand had helped her to a constituency.

But her legislative initiatives were defeated, and after just over three years she gave up the mandate in disappointment.

Your conclusion is

Gisèle Halimi (with Annick Cojean): "Be indomitable!".

My life for women's freedom.

Translated from the French by Kirsten Gleinig.

Aufbau Verlag, Berlin 2021., 140 p., hard copy, €20.