Simone Veil, 2008. Wikicommons/Marie-Lan Nguyen. Some rights reserved.In an age of political
vacuousness, we often ask what has happened to the quality of our leaders. Many
believe that we deserve such poor leaders because we live in trivial, reality
television-addled times dominated by consumerism. Electors across Europe seem,
more often than not, unhappy with the leaders of their respective political
parties.
The French however were never
unhappy with Simone Veil, who has died at the age of 89. She was a – reluctant – politician of stature
whose appeal transcended age, class and region. She was respected and held in
immense affection ever since, as minister of health of President Valery Giscard
d’Estaing in 1974 she won the bitter battle to make abortion legal, at a time
when most French male politicians, especially if they were conservative Catholics,
wanted women as tokens in ministerial office – government was a man’s business.
Simone Veil survived Auschwitz
and though never a campaigner for Jewish causes knew that being Jewish was
central to her life. She did not take kindly to the brutal killing fields of
the Balkans in the 1990s or Gaza being called genocide. She had witnessed the
Holocaust and knew the difference. She refused to accept General de Gaulle’s
decision to cover up French complicity in the Holocaust and objected to his
disdainful rhetoric after Israel's victory in the Six Day War in 1967, to the effect that Jews were an eternally “domineering” people, a rhetoric that owed
rather more than it acknowledged to the 1930s right. She was bitter that it
took the French state till 1995 to acknowledge that it was the French
government, not simply a perverse band of Petainists that organised the
deportation of Jews from France till 1944.
She is remembered today as the
first president of the European parliament – to which she was elected MP in
1979. She was a passionate believer in the European project because history and
her family’s life – she lost her parents and brother in the gas ovens of
Germany and Lithuania – told her it was the only way to prevent another war in
Europe. She never had a rude word to say about Germans, thus helping to
reconcile a generation of young French people to their country’s erstwhile
enemy.
It is totally in keeping with
the ideals of the French republic that she should be laid to rest, with her husband
Antoine Veil, who died in 2013, in the Pantheon. Not since the late nineteenth
century and the death of the poet Victor Hugo has the French head of state
decided to honour a French citizen so fully and upon her death. What may be more
surprising is that the Algerian president Abdelaziz Bouteflika should have
praised her in such emotional terms.
As a young magistrate during
the war of liberation of Algeria, she was sent in 1957 to visit prisons there
and was so appalled by what she witnessed that she wrote her report to the
ministry of justice by hand, not trusting a typed copy not to go astray. She
pleaded for Front de Liberation National prisoners who were condemned to the
guillotine – who numbered a few hundred – to be moved to French prisons as she
was afraid that they might be murdered in prison by enraged French officers.
After all, Francois Mitterrand had allowed many executions of FLN prisoners not
long before, when he was minister of justice. She ensured that FLN women
prisoners were regrouped in one prison in France to ensure greater protection.
When they married, her husband
saw the role of his wife as that of a mother at home, but Simone Veil would
have none of that and was determined to become a judge. Her husband gave up his
wish to go into politics and went into business, but his wife was always a
reluctant politician. When it was suggested she should stand for the presidency
she demurred, the French were not ready to elect a woman president. She was a
tower of moral rectitude like that other great Jewish figure of French post war
politics, Pierre Mendes France.
Personally she had a capacity
to engage seriously with all those she met. After testifying to the UN
Commission of Eminent Persons on Algeria, of which she was a member, at a
meeting in Lisbon in June 1998, she came over to congratulate me and make a few
remarks about what I had said. Over dinner, presided over by the Portuguese
president Mario Soares, her comments were pithy and sometimes very funny. Her
capacity to empathise and engage with someone she did not know, her deep
intelligence and luminous eyes across which flicked a sudden sadness – as if
pictures of Auschwitz were coming back, made a few hours with her
unforgettable.
She was a grande dame to her fingertips. When receiving her at the Académie
Française in 2012, Jean d’Ormesson struck the right note : “Comme l’immense majorité des Français, nous
vous aimons Madame. Soyez la bienvenue au
fauteuil de Racine, qui parlait si bien de l’amour.”