As a symbol, Robert Badinter died on February 9, at the age of 95. 81 years old, to the day, after his father's roundup in Lyon. “It’s as if, deep down, he was expressing his loyalty to the memory of his father, who died when he was 14,” declares Yonathan Arfi, president of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (Crif), who had met a few months ago.

Coming from a Jewish family from Central Europe, Robert Badinter was only 14 years old on February 9, 1943, when his father, Simon, was rounded up with 85 other Jews on rue Sainte-Catherine in Lyon. “That day, Robert Badinter's relationship with the world changed,” explains Yonathan Arfi. “He put the fight against anti-Semitism at the heart of his priorities, and his tireless commitment to justice is obviously linked to this commitment to the memory of his family." Of the 86 Jews deported that day to the camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Sobibor (for his father) and Bergen-Belsen, only three returned alive in 1945.

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His uncle, Naftoul, has already been deported to Auschwitz, as has his paternal grandmother, Shindléa, aged 80 and who died during the journey. “And I don’t count the number of my cousins,” Robert Badinter declared to the newspaper Le Monde in 2018. “You know, on the wall of the Shoah Memorial, many of mine are there.” Helped by a French police commissioner who distributes them false identity cards, Robert, his brother and his mother hide until the end of the war in Cognin, a Savoyard town.

On the front line against discrimination

Having become a business lawyer, then a criminal lawyer, Robert Badinter was appointed Keeper of the Seals by François Mitterrand in 1981. Fiercely fighting all discrimination, it was under his leadership that the death penalty was abolished in 1981, and that the decriminalization of homosexuality was voted by the National Assembly on July 26, 1982. Decisions which sometimes earned him hostile reactions: "He experienced anti-Semitism at different times in his career, but he always knew how to put things in perspective, he who had experienced anti-Semitic persecution as a child,” reports Crif president Yonathan Arfi.

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However, the Minister of Justice has not forgotten the executioners of the Shoah. When the hunt for Klaus Barbie, nicknamed the "butcher of Lyon", ended in February 1983, Robert Badinter took the highly symbolic decision to have him incarcerated in Montluc prison, in Lyon. The same prison where thousands of inmates were tortured by Gestapo men during World War II. “There is a collision between the man of law that Badinter is and his personal life since he was a victim of the anti-Semitic policy of Vichy and of the Shoah. He will be on the front line on these subjects” , says Tal Bruttmann, historian of the Shoah.

Sometimes unpopular decisions

Even if it means attracting the wrath of public opinion. On July 16, 1992, it was he who defended François Mitterrand during the 50th commemoration of the Vel d'Hiv roundup (13,000 Jews arrested by French police on July 16 and 17, 1942). The Socialist President, who had declared a few days earlier that the Republic was not accountable for the actions of Vichy, was booed by part of the crowd. Dismayed, Robert Badinter, then president of the Constitutional Council, went to the podium and began a speech that would remain famous: "I would have expected to experience everything, except the feeling that I felt a moment ago and which I am telling you right now with all my strength as a man: you have shamed me!” 

With the disappearance of Robert Badinter, France loses one of its last great moral consciences.



Robert Badinter symbolically leaves us on February 9, the anniversary of the raid on rue Sainte-Catherine in Lyon on February 9, 1943, during which his father was… pic.twitter.com/rEMaHpj2DQ

— Yonathan Arfi (@Yonathan_Arfi) February 9, 2024

In 2001, it was again he who demanded, against the tide of public opinion, the release due to his advanced age of collaborator Maurice Papon, although he was sentenced in 1998 to ten years of criminal imprisonment for complicity in crimes against 'humanity. “He is an old man, keeping him in prison at that age has, in my eyes, no longer any significance,” declared the socialist senator from Hauts-de-Seine on television.

Until the end of his life, Robert Badinter continued to work for the memory of the Shoah and to fight against those they called “falsifiers of history”. In 2007, he notably condemned the former literature professor Robert Faurisson for his negationist comments. In recent years, he has regularly worried about the increase in anti-Semitic acts observed in France. “With all those of his generation, he saw the old demons that he had known as a child during the Occupation rise again,” says Yonathan Arfi. “For him, who had worked so hard for the Republic, there was something extremely painful to see these persecutions return." President Emmanuel Macron has already announced that a national tribute will be paid to the former Minister of Justice.

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