Robert Badinter, former Minister of Justice and architect of the abolition of the death penalty in France, died at the age of 95, we learned on February 9. In March 2020, the man who had made the end of capital punishment his hobby horse spoke to Christophe Hondelatte about this fight.
Robert Badinter spoke at length to Christophe Hondelatte and told him about the crusade he led against the death penalty. In the first episode, available as a podcast (and below), the former Minister of Justice recounts his failure during the Roger Bontems trial. This former soldier, convicted after a deadly hostage-taking in the Clairvaux power plant in 1972, was executed. “I have the feeling that it was a foregone conclusion,” he remembers. “I admire this kind of blind confidence that I had in an outcome which, I thought, could be favorable, that is to say avoiding the death penalty,” declares Robert Badinter. The lawyer recognizes a form of naivety: “I was young and I didn’t understand anything.”