The man who stopped France cutting a living man in two
For years after men walked on the moon, France was still executing convicts in capital cases the old-fashioned way, as it had for more than two centuries: by “taking a living man and cutting him in two.”
That was Robert Badinter’s intentionally shocking description of the workings of a guillotine, which remained the legal form of capital punishment in France until 1981, when, owing largely to his efforts as justice minister, it was abolished.
He was hero and hated
When Badinter died last week, aged 95, he was hailed as a hero and visionary, a model of republican enlightenment in a country where that description is the highest praise. Yet during his long struggle to end France’s trademark form of state-sponsored barbarism, he was widely reviled, frequently threatened, heavily guarded — and at least once the target of an assassination attempt, when a bomb blew up at his apartment’s doorstep.
A handful of countries had ended capital punishment earlier — including Britain, for most crimes except treason — but France’s move was a watershed. In the ensuing four decades, more than 90 countries, representing roughly half the world’s total, have followed suit; in dozens more, the death penalty remains on the books but is no longer used.
Yet in very few of those nations was the decision so ineluctably the result of one individual’s sheer force of will and persuasion. That’s what makes Badinter’s story extraordinary.
A Jew whose well-to-do family was decimated in the Holocaust, he was a stellar student and brilliant lawyer whose early-career renown attracted a star-studded roster of clients in civil cases, including Raquel Welch and Brigitte Bardot. Yet it was a criminal case, in which Badinter represented a man charged as an accessory to murder, that changed his trajectory — and France’s.
His client was Roger Bontems, a prison inmate who had helped a fellow convict take a guard and a nurse hostage and cut their throats in the prison infirmary. Bontems did not wield the knife, but he went to the guillotine anyway, his appeals for mercy spurned by courts and President Georges Pompidou in the face of public fury.
Badinter was a witness in 1972 to Bontems’s decapitation at dawn, a morbid spectacle that transformed him from lawyer to crusader. “It’s one thing to have an intellectual belief and another thing is injustice,” he told an interviewer in 2005, later adding, “I saw a man, in the name of justice, cut in pieces. I couldn’t accept this idea of justice. It’s the opposite of justice. And from then on I became a militant.”
His principled militancy
His militancy was principled, which he demonstrated by continuing to defend the most heinous defendants, including one convicted of murdering a 7-year-old boy. Badinter’s success in persuading a jury to spare his client’s life made him one of the most reviled public figures in France.
On becoming justice minister in the government of President François Mitterrand, in 1981, he made abolishing the death penalty his first priority. “Tomorrow, thanks to you, there will no longer be stealthy executions at dawn, under a black canopy that shame us all,” he told French lawmakers, who acceded to his will.
His efforts may have spared the life of the man responsible for having deported Badinter’s own father to a Nazi death camp during World War II. That was Klaus Barbie, “the butcher of Lyon,” a notorious SS officer whose extradition to France, from Bolivia, Badinter pursued as justice minister.
In a landmark French trial in 1987 that featured testimony from Holocaust survivors, Barbie was convicted of crimes against humanity and sentenced to life in prison, where he died in 1991. Barbie was a monster, but Badinter was glad he was spared the guillotine. Courts should deliver justice, he said, not vengeance.
He was also instrumental in decriminalizing homosexuality, improving prison conditions and ending state security courts, which tried terrorists and others in secret, with no right to appeal.
The questions’ still unsettled
On Wednesday in Paris, Badinter’s flag-draped coffin was borne by an honor guard into the Place Vendôme, a magisterial square flanked by the Justice Ministry he once led. He was eulogized by President Emmanuel Macron as a man who “sought to make justice more humane and humanity more just.”
Yet the debate on capital punishment remains unsettled. Right-wing leader Marine Le Pen, who leads polls ahead of France’s 2027 presidential election, favors a national referendum on restoring the death penalty. If that happens, it would be a test of whether, in Badinter’s framing, justice or revenge prevails.