PARIS — 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.

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.

Advertisement

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.

Advertisement

His client was Roger Bontems, a prison inmate who had helped a fellow convict take a guard and a nurse hostage and cut their........

© Washington Post