Anti-colonialist, tireless defender of women’s rights, the Algerian FLN lawyer deserved a national tribute presided over by Emmanuel Macron on March 8 in Paris.
By Mérième Alaoui, in Paris
Even in her « childhood in a poor Sephardic family in Tunisia, Gisèle Halimi was what she is today, at the time of paying tribute to her, with an unruly fever and burning anger ». These are the words chosen by Emmanuel Macron to evoke Gisèle Halimi, née Zeiza Taïeb, the renowned French-Tunisian lawyer who passed away on July 28, 2020. Despite a Franco-French controversy over her entry into the Panthéon, the nation paid symbolic tribute to her on World Women’s Day, on March 8. This was the occasion for the President to announce that the right to abortion, for which she had been an active campaigner, would be enshrined in the Constitution, making it inviolable.
“Letting other women down is the worst thing for women who have had the opportunity to study & have what I call the power of knowledge »
The childhood story that best represents the activist lawyer, who was born on July 27, 1927 in La Goulette, Tunisia is her hunger strike. « When I was 12, I went on hunger strike because the girls served the boys, » she told Radio France in a program dedicated to her. Unsurprisingly, she then fought to continue her studies and avoid the predetermined fate of an arranged marriage. When she arrived in Paris to join the law faculty, she discovered racism and inequality, as her naturalized French father was fascinated by the ideals of France. As a lawyer, she had « a score to settle with the Republic » and decided to defend the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN). She met the emblematic Djamila Boupacha, a young nurse who had planted bombs, and defended her passionately during a trial that mobilized the whole world and involved great names such as Simone de Beauvoir, Picasso, Sartre… « Gisèle Halimi wanted to make this woman sentenced to death the living remorse of a war that was denied, the unworthy treatment inflicted to her and the justice that was misused, » said Emmanuel Macron, referring to the systematic torture by the French army and the mass rape of Algerian women.
“Gisèle Halimi has thus become the figurehead of contemporary feminism, a feminism that seeks to awaken consciences, to eliminate inequalities, to strive with authority and determination for a world of harmony between women and men”
The indefatigable Gisèle Halimi is indeed a passionate defender of women’s causes. “Letting other women down is the worst thing for women who have had the opportunity to study & have what I call the power of knowledge,” is one of her most famous quotes. Each of her battles was turned into a political platform and fought brilliantly, such as the famous Bobigny trial in 1972. She defended a young woman who had been raped at the age of sixteen and had had an abortion with the help of her mother, as well as three women who were considered accomplices. The impact was such that three years later abortion was legalized by the abortion law introduced by her friend Simone Veil and President Valéry Giscard D’Estaing.
But there is need to move faster and further. A lawyer close to the Socialist Party, she was elected to parliament in 1981. « Gisèle Halimi has thus become the figurehead of contemporary feminism, a feminism that seeks to awaken consciences, to eliminate inequalities, to strive with authority and determination for a world of harmony between women and men, » the president said in his speech.
Beyond this national homage, the name of Gisèle Halimi has also entered the long process of pantheonization. After much controversy in France, the Elysée Palace has confirmed that the process has been set in motion so that the famous anti-colonial lawyer of African origin can one day enter the enclosure of a monumental symbol of the Republic.
