Welcome address to the guests of honor: Elisabeth and Robert Badinter, Simone Veil — Jews fully in their time

A congress entitled “Jews among the nations” could not but pay tribute, a particular tribute, to the three figures we wish to honor this evening. They are the dazzling example of Jews wholly inscribed in the political, social, and cultural life of their country, without having for all that renounced their heritage, their memory, their manifold loyalties. More than that, they have inscribed into their practice of politics, of justice, of writing, the mark of an ethical demand that makes them the heirs of the rights of man as much as of the prophets. It is remarkable to see that their paths could follow diverse routes, in terms of political choices, and yet bear witness to a conception of the service of the State, of justice, or of writing as a liberating force that transcends the categories of politics.

Robert Badinter, unfortunately, is not with us this evening, because he is in Macedonia, on a mission for the protection of minorities.

For many French people, Robert Badinter will remain the man who, as Keeper of the Seals, had the death penalty abolished in France.

I believe that the reasons for this absence are in the image of the man to whom we pay tribute this evening. Robert Badinter — I shall begin with him — will remain, for many French people, the man who, as Garde des Sceaux (Keeper of the Seals, France’s Minister of Justice), had the death penalty abolished in France, the man who took the rights of the victim into account while refusing to cast the guilty party out of humanity. Lawyer, politician, legislator, teacher and pedagogue, writer, playwright, he has placed his manifold talents in the service of one and the same passion. It is enough to evoke the traces of a considerable body of work, which has, in a certain way, changed our society and the gaze it casts upon itself.

As a lawyer, first, since 1951, he waged an incessant struggle to ¹ awaken public opinion to the unbearable horror of the death penalty.

As a politician, in which capacity he held the post of Garde des Sceaux from ’81 to ’86, as president of the Constitutional Council from ’86 to ’95, and today as senator. He was then a fertile legislator, and we owe to him — you will see that the list speaks for itself — the abolition of the death penalty, the repeal of the “security and liberty” law, the repeal of the offense of homosexuality, the abolition of the high-security wings in prisons, the abolition of the special courts, the creation of a council for the prevention of delinquency, the creation of the so-called “public-utility” sentences, that is to say non-custodial sentences for minor offenses, the filmed recording of historic trials, and finally the creation of victim-support services — I say “finally,” I ought to say “and so on.” You can see that the work is altogether considerable.

As a writer, we may cite the books which, despite their apparent diversity, all bear witness to these same struggles under another form. On the one hand, against the death penalty, in 1973 he writes L’Exécution (The Execution), with a great passion that will lead him, precisely, to that law; for liberty, when he writes in 1976 Liberté Liberté (Liberty Liberty); for the Enlightenment, and that is the fine Condorcet, which he writes with Elisabeth, his wife, in 1988; for the place of the Jews at last recognized among the nations, and that is this marvelous book, Libres et Égaux (Free and Equal), which deals with the emancipation of the Jews by the French Revolution. A play, staged recently, last year, about Oscar Wilde, in which he denounces the fate suffered by that author on account of his homosexuality.

A book in progress², on the fate of Jewish lawyers under Vichy. I have the moving memory of his presentation, a few months ago, at the Court of Appeal, on the first work concerning this book; his emotion was so intense in evoking so many of his fellow lawyers who suffered the laws of Vichy; this will yield a book we await with impatience. Here is a very rapid panorama, of course, but one that would suffice to give an idea of the scale of the political, intellectual, and legal work of a man who never ceased to affirm himself as French and as Jewish, and who, we believe, will gladly accept this designation of “man of the Enlightenment.” I must also say, with much emotion, that he was my law professor at this university, Paris 1, and I keep a memory of that examination for the certificate of aptitude to the profession of lawyer; the theme was “crime and literature,” and he noted that the first of crimes was, in the Bible, one

of his earliest themes — and we already see his inspiration, which was at once the Bible and his desire for justice. I am happy to be able, in the end, myself, to render this tribute.

So, we were speaking of a “man of the Enlightenment” — and why does one never speak of a “woman of the Enlightenment”? We should like to create a term that is missing, and that our two guests present here fully justify.

Elisabeth Badinter has waged a struggle for the liberation of women, for their mental rather than their material liberation.

Elisabeth Badinter, for whom we have a particular gratitude, since she has been a member of one of our secular Jewish associations (the AJHL, the Association of Secular Humanistic Jews) since its origin in 1989. So she did believe in it. She was right: our 6th congress is, in this respect, eloquent. She has waged a struggle for the liberation of women, for their mental rather than their material liberation, which gives a new face to the relations between men and women, allowing each to break out of the stereotypes in which they were confined, to build a relationship allowing for more freedom, more truth.

In L’amour en plus (Mother Love), the task was to call into question the famous maternal instinct and to show that, if it arises from a social behavior, variable across the ages, what is at stake is not a programmed reflex but a choice, the result of a privileged relationship between mother and child. Within this framework, Elisabeth Badinter opened a space for a privileged relationship between father and child, for a new paternal love, hence for an image of the family freed of its stereotypes. In XY, it is to the face of masculinity that Elisabeth Badinter turns, sketching the outline of that man of the twentieth century who, a wounded man, attempts to free himself from the images of masculine virility that have been imposed upon him. It is a new space of freedom and introspection that she opens up.

With Condorcet, which she writes with Robert Badinter, it is one of the most luminous faces of laïcité (French secularism) that she draws; it is also the reflection of her own struggle for laïcité, a struggle in which she makes her voice heard, notably at the time of the affair of the Islamic veil, in a very firm manner. Engaged, too, in the Israeli-Palestinian dialogue, at a time when any agreement seems improbable, and rejecting, moreover, the quota for women so much spoken of today in political life, despite her feminist struggle, she draws a fine image of the freedom of woman.

The destiny of Simone Veil might be emblematic of that of a generation of French Jews. Born of a

Congress dossier: Jews among the nations

Jewish and republican family, Simone Jacob is deported at the age of 17 with her mother and her sister. A survivor of Auschwitz, having attained the highest offices, she becomes the symbol of a threefold struggle — that of a woman, of a citizen, but also of the struggle of memory against oblivion. We owe her a particular gratitude, since within our international movement, ten years ago, she had already given her precious support to our movement for the expression of Jewish modernity. I must say that we feel quite small, in the International Federation of Secular Jews, in conferring today this tribute before the countless academic recognitions of which she has been the object throughout the world for her work and for her courage — and notably the Truman Peace Prize in Jerusalem in 1981, to cite only that one. The first woman minister, Simone Veil had been Minister of Health in the three governments of Raymond Barre, after defending in 1974, against her own majority, the law on the right to abortion, henceforth known as the Veil law, which was a true revolution of mores in our country. A convinced European, she was the first president of the European Parliament, of which she is a member; Simone Veil has never dissociated her political struggle from her struggle for the freedom and the equality of women.

The destiny of Simone Veil might be emblematic of the destiny of a generation of French Jews.

Her work for adoption in 1969 shows the importance she already attached to the family, and to health, a domain in which she excelled as a minister. She puts all her energy into redressing a flagrant inequality in our society, modern and democratic though it is: the low proportion of women in politics and in institutional life. A Jewish woman and a survivor of the Shoah, she has never ceased to bear witness, for us and for future generations, to what the Nazi horror was. The struggle for memory being, above all, a struggle of vigilance. And it is in the same spirit that she has always engaged herself, very clearly here too, in the struggle for Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Arab peace. Let us take up the words of a work that Maurice Safran devoted to her life under the title Simone Veil, Destin (Simone Veil, Destiny); he says: “Why is Simone Veil so popular? Why do French people of such different political, cultural, and religious origins recognize themselves in her?

It is that to retrace the tragic and superb destiny of Simone Veil is, above all, to understand the history of this century.” •