Simone Veil honoured with burial in Pantheon

Hundreds lined the streets of Paris yesterday to pay homage to Simone Veil, the Holocaust survivor who legalised abortion in the Seventies in France, as she joined the country’s great figures interred in the Pantheon.

Veil, who died aged 89 in June last year, was laid to rest with her husband Antoine in the mausoleum crypt alongside national icons including the writers Emile Zola and Victor Hugo and Voltaire, the philosopher.

A Jewish survivor of a Nazi death camp, she was a fervent European and civil libertarian, becoming the first directly elected president of the European Parliament in 1979. She was best known in France for legalising abortion as health minister in 1974.