President Emmanuel Macron had announced the former Minister of Justice would be given the honour of a place in the Panthéon during a national tribute paid after Badinter’s death on February 9th, 2024.
Badinter’s name “will have to be inscribed alongside those who have done so much for human progress and for France,” he said.
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Robert Badinter was “the Republic made man” and “a force that lives and wrestles life from the hands of death”, Macron added.
Being given a place in the Panthéon is France's highest posthumous honour, reserved for people who have made some kind of outstanding contribution to France or French life.
Born into a Jewish family that had emigrated from Bessarabia – now Moldova – Badinter survived the Second World War in occupied France.
When he was 14, his father was among a group of Jews rounded up by the Gestapo in the southeastern city of Lyon and deported to the Sobibor concentration camp in modern-day Poland, where he died.
The young Badinter developed a keen sense of justice that led him to a law degree in France followed by a Masters from New York’s Columbia University, with a focus on ethical issues.
The soft-spoken attorney, who said he could not abide a “killer justice system”, was widely vilified for pushing through legislation banning the death penalty at a time when most French people still supported the practice.
“Guillotining is nothing less than taking a living man and cutting him in two,” he argued during one notorious case.
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He said later he had "never felt so lonely" in fighting to end capital punishment. But in years to come he would be hailed for his integrity and statesmanship.
He had built a reputation as a lawyer for defending – often successfully – notorious cases that his peers refused to touch. He saved six men from execution during his legal career.
On his appointment as justice minister in President François Mitterrand’s government in June 1981, Badinter made ending the death penalty an immediate priority.
France’s last execution had been in 1977 with the death of Hamida Djandoubi, a Tunisian immigrant convicted of torturing and murdering a young woman.
Four months after taking office Badinter ushered abolition through parliament with a landmark speech denouncing the “stealthy executions at dawn” that were France’s “collective shame”.
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Two years later, he succeeded in getting Bolivia to extradite Klaus Barbie, a former chief of the Nazis’ secret police, the Gestapo, to France.
Jewish historian and Resistance fighter Marc Bloch will in turn be honoured in the Panthéon on June 16th, 2026, 82 years after his execution by the Gestapo in 1944, AFP reports.
According to Le Figaro, the families did not want their loved-ones' bodies to be “transferred”. But a cenotaph — a funerary monument – will be erected in their honour.
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Macron, who is pursuing a long cycle of commemorations around the end of the Second World War, has already welcomed four other great personalities to this republican temple: Simone Veil, Maurice Genevoix, Josephine Baker and Missak Manouchian.
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