Robert Badinter, the French justice minister who ended the death penalty in France in 1981, entered the country’s Panthéon mausoleum of outstanding historical figures, just hours after his grave was vandalized.
Badinter, a lawyer who campaigned for an end to capital punishment after one of his clients was beheaded with a guillotine in the 1970s, died last year aged 95. His legacy also includes a 1982 law to decriminalize homosexuality
His remains are to stay in a cemetery outside Paris, but officers carried a symbolic casket draped in a French flag into the former church on the capital’s left bank under a cascade of applause.
President Emmanuel Macron, inside the Panthéon, said Badinter’s voice would ring out in posterity. “As he enters the Panthéon, we hear his voice advocating for these great, essential and unfinished battles,” he said, mentioning “the universal abolition of the death penalty,” as well as the fight against antisemitism and to uphold the rule of law. “These are causes that transcend centuries,” he added.
Badinter joined other national heroes, including author Victor Hugo, French-American member of the French Resistance Josephine Baker and Simone Veil, the women’s rights heavyweight and health minister who championed legalizing abortion.
The son of a Jewish fur trader who died in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II, as a lawyer, Badinter built a reputation defending clients his peers wouldn’t touch.
Badinter’s advocacy against capital punishment started in 1972, following the beheading of his client, Roger Bontems, for his secondary role in murdering a nurse and guard during a prison escape.
