There are beings who, through their journey and their personal history, transcend their century. Robert Badinter was one of them. He had the intransigence of someone who knows his causes are just and never deviates from his path, except to unleash anger whose echo pierced our souls (see video below). Robert Badinter was not cheating. He was entirely in his fight, his fight for the dignity of the human being, even though he was a miserable author of the most appalling of crimes.
With Albert Camus, he embodied this justice of the heart which knows the torments of the human condition, its errors, its failings, its faults, but which, despite everything, continues to seek the light present in each of us. Robert Badinter spoke loudly. Each of his words had the magnificence and grandeur of a sermon. He did not stop at the baseness of the human species, he sublimated it to always try to pull it upwards.
He knew human darkness like no other. He had seen it at work during the arrest and deportation of his father. He had worked alongside her during these trials where he defended the most hardened criminals. He had smelled it when, under the window of his ministry, a hateful crowd chanted his name. But despite all these trials, he never gave up fighting to restore everyone’s dignity and honor.
He impressed with his courage and his righteousness, this desire to never give in to the spirit of the times, to fashion, to the vociferations of the outside world and its shocks. He spoke the law in all that it was most severe and rigorous, without giving in anything, with the conviction rooted in the depths of his being that death spoken in the name of the rule of law represented a defeat for all of humanity.
In a way, by abolishing capital punishment, he triumphed over death. He made it vulgar, atrocious, unapproachable. He fired her, ostracized her from society. Only death could cause death, never humans. His death was his great affair. The death of his father, the death of the one guillotined by the state apparatus, the Jewish death, the gypsy death, the vagabond death inflicted by millions in the extermination camps, the social death reserved for homosexuals, this ostracism which tended to separate humanity into two very distinct camps.
When anger seized him, he screamed not to make himself heard better, but because indignation, when it is the fruit of an outrage to the heart, cannot be calculated: it thunders like the gods thunder when the spectacle of humans disgusts them. Robert Badinter was not lying. He personified the profession of living, this requirement to be at every moment of one’s existence up to the ideals forged in the recesses of one’s conscience, where an entire system of values is erected that nothing can corrupt or damage.
But often, even at the heart of his fiercest diatribes, when he reprimanded a journalist or warmed up to a sharply asked question, at the corners of his lips there appeared the outline of a smile, a little childish smile full of mischief and tenderness, where one thought we saw the shadow of the cunning and perceptive little Jewish boy that ultimately, until his last days, he never ceased to be.
He loved France as only the children of immigrants love it. With passion, recognition and fervor. If he was also engaged in his fight against anti-Semitism, in his denunciation of the crimes of the Vichy regime, it is precisely because men and women had soiled this country, her beloved country. This desecration could not go unanswered. It was necessary to respond to the crime with the greatest possible persistence. What he did, without ever questioning his attachment to his native country, but looking it straight in the eye, without flinching.
We don’t really know what a “great man” is, but we do know that Robert Badinter was one. A righteous one. The last of the righteous.
