An autumn day at the Pantheon. A moment of grace and silence. A pause in the endless hustle and bustle of the little characters that have too often followed.
To the great men the country is grateful.
Robert Badinter he was a great man. It was in the sense of Seneca and of Camus. Of Michelet and of Carlyle.
And the people of France are there, not only to honor a dead person, but to not forget to be alive, that is, worthy, thoughtful and connected to something greater than oneself.
***
Memory. Early 1970s.
Two men, young and fiery, defended two criminals they could not save from the guillotine. One, Robert Badinter, defended Roger Bontems and published, in Fayard, Execution.
The other, Thierry Levyhe dedicates to his accomplice, Claude Buffet, The Judicial Animalwhich is one of the first books of my life as an editor at Grasset.
‘The Execution’, by Robert Badinter.
The two houses are neighbors, in the street of the Saints-Pères.
The two colleagues meet, sometimes with me, in the Twickenham, the café opposite, and discuss their anger.
One day, Robert Badinter quotes the maxim of Parents Treatywhere Hillel exclaims before a skull floating in the river: “because you killed, you were killed; but because you were killed, you will be killed.”
Everything is said. The endless circle of death. The imperative duty that the law that allows a man to be cut in two be abolished.
***
Another memory. a man, Patrick Henryhas murdered a seven-year-old boy.
Robert Badinter delivered one of the great arguments of the century, which did not address his ignoble client, but rather the moral failure of the death penalty. Gets perpetuity.
The criminal leaves prison and reoffends. And I see him, on rue Guynemer, in his house, disturbed, but unwavering.
Because nothing undermines this truth since then sealed by him: the canopy that was deployed over the guillotine must be absolutely rejected. But? will tell it to Darius Rochebinat the end of its existence, in To lifehis moving conversation that Gallimard publishes today: if not, it is the shroud of death that envelopes the social body and consumes its part of light.
***
Memories, always, but from the minister. Without François Mitterrand. With François Mitterrand. The respect that the Nietzschean François Mitterrand had for him (was not so common).
But, above all, his fine face, with clear lines, with that undergrowth of magnificent, leonine eyebrows. His haughty grace and how he knew how to be implacable.
And then, the old survivor who, in the gallery, when he was not improvising, read with strange half-moon glasses that marked who knows what setback, or distance, or height.
Robert Badinter had the additional task of having a face tailored to his person. He had it. It was beautiful.
***
What was behind his patrician mask?
I have a hypothesis. Like the maxim or the secret name that was sewn, in the past, on the back of his habit, there was the initial wound, the point of absolute blackness, of a father taken away by the forces of death; and the vow then formed to fight, the rest of his life, against the monstrosity of the world; and the idea that absolute Evil, when it comes, must be fought with a force greater than its own.
Robert Badinter’s fight cannot be understood any other way. The blood that he sees in the hands of Justice is the blood of his father (sweetness incarnate, he still says to Rochebin).
***
So, the Pantheon.
But be careful. Not his mortal remains, relics. Not a tomb, but a cenotaph.
Because the Jew’s body has already been touched too much and is no longer touched anymore?
Because of the respect that one professes, when one is Jewish, in every fiber of one’s being, for what remains of one’s flesh?
Because of the incomprehensible certainty that inhabits the biblical prescriptions and that announces the resurrection of the bodies?
Or of the projected shadow of the Shoah and its dark breath?
No one has commented on this decision. Then, Robert Badinter’s body awaits (like that of his ancestors who, in distant Bessarabia, smiled at their persecutors chanting their song of hope and life).
***
Among those who confusedly understood this: the barbarians who, in their criminal imbecility, chose that day, the eve of the ceremony, to come to the Bagneux cemetery to drool their hatred of his work of mercy and desecrate his last resting place.
Because I have not yet said that Robert Badinter had another fight that he had with Elizabethhis wife: that of a son of Jews from Yiddishland who had fallen in love with France because the Dreyfus affair had, of course, Zola a Bernard Lazare y Proustmade another side of the French genius flourish (but which had also seen unprecedented anti-Semitism unleashed).
No quarter, Robert Badinter will say. Not an inch given to the enemy.
Is the hatred with which his grave is stained when he no longer has the strength to respond to it his first defeat?
No. Because his great memory vouches for him.
And it is a masterful slap in the face of the old and new scoundrels.
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