“He had the courage to make himself unpopular”

Do you think Robert Badinter’s entry to the Pantheon is a form of evidence?

In any case, it seems to be done in a large consensus. The majority of our compatriots recognize in him a large moral figure, an icon of the Republic. And it seems to me all the more important to remember that it has not always been the case, far from it.

In 1981, when he defended the abolition of the death penalty in France, he went against the majority of public opinion. And he had to face terrible oppositions. He was hated by a part of the press which reproached him in particular for having saved the head of Patrick Henry who had killed a child, and who nicknamed him “the lawyer of the assassins”.

How do you explain the current consensus you mention?

By the strength of his commitment and the courage he had, precisely, to make himself unpopular to part of the opinion. As Simone Veil when she has legalized abortion, he defended his convictions with a determination that has never deviated and that no doubt have few politicians today … Both – she from the left – transcend partisan cleavages. These are voices that we miss.

You insist – this is the title of the documentary you have just made – on “”Robert Badinter’s little -known fights*»»…

He was thirty years lawyer, four years Minister of Justice, nine years president of the Constitutional Council and sixteen years Senator. To these high functions, throughout his life, he defended human rights, peace and human dignity.

I would like to emphasize the reform of the prisons he led: abolition of the uniform for prisoners, improvement of visiting rooms and access to care, introduction of television in cells – a decision that scandalizes but that supervisors appreciate.

For him, if there is no happy prison, there is a humiliated prison and a prison that improves. As a great disciple of Victor Hugo, he often quoted it: “The right that cannot be withdrawn from anyone is the right to become better.”

Where did this force of conviction and engagement draw?

In the spirit of the Enlightenment, for a part, which constituted his intellectual soil. But especially in his own life and especially in his childhood and adolescence. It is difficult to imagine today the wounds of those who knew the war. His father, a Russian Jew who arrived in France in 1919, was arrested in 1943 almost before his eyes. He saw hidden with his mother and brother.

After the war, they find their apartment occupied. They embark on a lawsuit. But as the father is “missing” – in reality dead in concentration camp – the procedure is dragging for two years. He also witnessed the mowing of a young woman with whom he had been a little in love.

These tests forge it. “At 17, I was an adult,” he said often. And what structures it from there is a visceral hatred of injustice. In 1956, he went to Auschwitz, and picked up a daisy which he will give to his mother with these words: “Life is stronger than death.” That said a lot of his commitment.

* Broadcast on Sunday October 12, 2025, at 6:50 p.m., on LCP.