“I shudder with horror when I think that Robert Badinter lived long enough to learn of the massacres of October 7 and the wave of anti-Semitism that followed. I cannot imagine what wave of suffering swept him away. the lover of France, the lover of the Republic. May Elisabeth’s love and the uninterrupted dialogue he maintained at the end of his life with Victor Hugo have brought him peace and comfort.” It is with his words of force as moving as they are accurate that Philippe Val paid tribute to Robert Badinter on the airwaves of Europe 1. Philippe Val not only recalls the tragic past of the Badinter family, of this son who assisted to the arrest of his father during the roundup on rue Sainte-Catherine in Lyon, a father who would not return, murdered in the Sobibor extermination camp, but also his love for France which he helped to make more republican, commensurate with the ambitions of the Enlightenment, in the name of freedom and justice. There is neither resentment nor revenge in Robert Badinter, but the desire to prove, through actions, through the law, that the Republic is a fight that admits no exceptions.
Having become the great lawyer that he was, then the emblematic Minister of Justice who not only abolished the death penalty but also decriminalized homosexuality or even improved the rights of victims as well as those of prisoners, Robert Badinter kept in mind, with a stubbornness that honors him, a certain idea of Man and his dignity, a refusal to let the contradictory and passionate waves of public opinion diminish the grandeur of republican ideas, through fear, cowardice, passion morbid or banal fashion effect. Thus, he will have fought all fanaticism, whether it takes the form of the extreme right, the extreme left or Islamism. Nothing can ever justify reducing justice in the name of an idealism which imagines building happy tomorrows on the corpses of hypothetical enemies.
Robert Badinter was a man of justice. During the trial of Klaus Barbie, he has in hand the deportation order for his father signed by this German war criminal who has just been sentenced but not to the death penalty that Badinter has abolished. Robert Badinter then thinks that his father would have been proud of him. “Blood is washed with tears and not with blood,” wrote Victor Hugo. Badinter also opposed Serge Klarsfeld on the question of the release, for health reasons, of Maurice Papon, sentenced to ten years of criminal imprisonment for complicity in crimes against humanity. Badinter believed “there comes a time when humanity must prevail over crime.”
It is not enough to drape ourselves in great principles, we must apply them, despite this very human death drive which cries out for vengeance and which we hope to be a relief, whereas it is only a slow poison. We must, through arduous effort, whisper justice – which is also the refusal to forget as well as to forgive. Because we do not forgive more by killing, we prevent healing and therefore the future, we dwell on our pain by transforming it into a morbid weapon which will end up turning against itself. In the name of justice, Robert Badinter also refused to make the victim’s words sacred. We don’t mess around with the law, and it is more difficult to maintain one’s humanism than to brush aside its principles for convenience and to please those who will always prefer shortcuts which only provide consolation for a moment. Time to trample on the principles that underpin civilization. When we realize it, it is too late, the rule of law has already crumbled.
Robert Badinter, it was also secularism which is a reconciliation and humanism: “Secularism is not only the necessary corollary of freedom of opinion and equality between believers of all faiths and non-believers. Secularism is today in the Republic the guarantor of the dignity of each and every person. Jean Jaurès already said in 1905 that “secularism was the end of the reprobate”. This is where the primary meaning of secularism lies: I respect you beyond our differences of religion or opinion as well as gender, race or sexual orientation because you are a human being like me, you are my brother or my sister in humanity.” Thank you Mr. Badinter.
.