One of the few French postwar politicians to earn near unanimous respect, Simone Veil, has died aged 89.
Deported from France by the Nazis aged 16, she survived Birkenau, although her mother and sister perished.
On her return to France she embarked upon a career in the law, becoming a magistrate, and in 1956 became
the Director of French prisons. Marking a break with her predecessors, she visited many such institutions
personally and railed at the primitive, “medieval” conditions she found there.
In 1962 she became Minister of civil Affairs, and took a principled stand on adoptions, becoming a pioneer
of the idea that a childs’ rights should come first, an idea later amplified by Francoise Dolto in her
landmark book “The baby is a person”.
This was her first experience of the brutality of parliamentary debate, and the ingrained sexism of the
legislature.
Thirteen years later came the key moment in her political career when she forced through, in the teeth of furious
opposition form within her own party, the law allowing abortion for the first time in France. It earned her vilification,
with her actions being compared to the Nazis, and her home and husband’s car were defaced with swastikas.
She became a hate figure for the ultra-Catholic far right, which never forgave her.
President Giscard d’Estaing chose his Health Minister to lead the centre-right’s list for the 1979 European
elections, and this led to her becoming the President of the European Parliament. She sat in the assembly until 1993,
when she returned to government in France as Prime Minister Eduard Balladur’s Social Affairs Minister.
A fervent European, in 1998 she become a member of France’s Constitutional Court, a position she held until 2007.
In 2010 Veil received the supreme accolade that can be awarded to a French public figure, being elected to the
Academie Francaise, and took seat 13, previously held by Racine.
