The Tunisian-born French human rights lawyer Gisèle Halimi was only 12 when she made her first stand as a feminist. It was 1939 and, in her Sephardic Jewish home in majority-Muslim Tunisia, she went on an eight-day hunger strike against her parents.
She demanded that they treat her equally to her two brothers, not force her to serve them their meals, not impose religious fervor upon her and also allow her to read. Her father, who she later said had been disappointed to have a daughter, caved in. That night, she wrote in her diary: “I have won my first little piece of liberty.”
Mrs. Halimi went on to become one of France’s best-known and rebellious human rights and abortion rights lawyers over the next seven decades, including a three-year spell as a socialist member of Parliament under French President François Mitterrand in the 1980s. She was instrumental in making abortion in France legal, toughening French laws against rape and abolishing the death penalty.
Advertisement
She died July 28, the day after her 93rd birthday, in Paris, according to one of her three sons, Emmanuel Faux, who gave no cause.
Mrs. Halimi first drew attention in 1956 as a young Parisian lawyer defending Algerian nationalists arrested during a bloody eight-year war for independence from France.
Some of her clients were considered terrorists, and Mrs. Halimi received regular death threats from the Organisation Armée Secrète (OAS), a right-wing paramilitary group that itself used terrorist tactics. Its motto was “Algeria is French and will remain so,” but it crumbled when Algeria gained its freedom in 1962.
“I condemn terrorism when it hits innocent people,” she told the London Guardian decades later. “But there are innocent victims for the best causes in the world. In Algiers, in Dresden ... in Israel, too, before its creation, there was terrorism. It’s important to ask the right questions. You say: ‘Why terrorism?’ I say: ‘Why occupation?’ As long as there is occupation contrary to international law, you can expect terrorism. Once there is an end to the occupation ... there will be no terrorism.”
Advertisement
In 1966, along with the existentialist philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre and feminist intellectual Simone de Beauvoir, Mrs. Halimi played a leading role in the “Russell Tribunal,” organized by the British philosopher Bertrand Russell to investigate and evaluate U.S. policy and actions in Vietnam.
The self-styled tribunal concluded that the United States had committed war crimes in Vietnam, but critics said the findings were strongly biased by left-wing or pro-communist participants, and the tribunal’s findings found little traction worldwide.
In 1971, having befriended Sartre and de Beauvoir, Mrs. Halimi co-founded an association called Choisir La Cause des Femmes (Choose the Cause of Women) to fight for women’s rights to abortion in largely Catholic France. It became more simply known as Choisir (Choose).
Advertisement
That same year, she was one of 343 prominent French women, including actress Catherine Deneuve, who signed an open letter saying they’d had illegal abortions. Mrs. Halimi said she had terminated three pregnancies. The letter, known as Manifesto 343, galvanized the strongly Catholic French establishment and turned Mrs. Halimi into a feminist icon.
In 1972, she was front-page news in France when she defended Marie-Claire Chevalier, a minor on trial for having an abortion after she was raped. Mrs. Halimi’s quiet but passionate courtroom appearance won the case, the girl was acquitted and the majority of French public opinion changed forever.
Mrs. Halimi won the support of fellow lawyer and women’s rights activist Simone Veil, by then the minister of health in the government of President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, who passed a law to decriminalize abortion in 1975, a historic moment in France.
Zeiza Gisèle Élise Taïeb was born July 27, 1927, to a poor family in the La Goulette port district of Tunis, the capital of Tunisia then under French colonial rule. Her father was a clerk in a law office, her mother the daughter of a rabbi.
Advertisement
In her later writings, Mrs. Halimi said she had learned that her father had been so upset about having a daughter, rather than another son, that he kept her birth secret for weeks. Her father had believed that having a girl brought bad luck, she wrote. “At each step of my life, there were disadvantages stemming from the fact I was a girl,” she told the radio station France Culture in 2011.
Share this articleShareWhen she was 15, her mother tried to force her into an arranged marriage with what her mother called a “très sympa” (very nice) man, a wealthy oil trader twice her age. In a 2019 interview with the French daily Le Monde, Mrs. Halimi said: “When I refused, my mother replied, ‘But he has two cars!’”
Having challenged her parents, she went a step higher and challenged their God. They had told her that if she prayed to God, she would do well at school. One morning, on her way to an exam she was sure she could pass, she declined to kiss the mezuza, a holy parchment on the doorjambs of devout Jews. She not only passed the exam but with the best result in her class. She reckoned she no longer needed God’s help and became a lifelong atheist.
Advertisement
Prodigious at school in Tunis, she moved to Paris in 1945 to study law. After graduating from the Sorbonne in 1949, and still only 21, she returned to Tunisia to practice.
Giséle took her surname from Paul Halimi, whom she married in 1956. After their divorce, she married, in 1961, Claude Faux, a personal assistant to Sartre, but she retained the name Halimi as a lawyer and writer. “Claude and Jean-Paul were the only male feminists I had ever known,” she once said.
Once asked whether she should be addressed as madame or mademoiselle (Mrs. or Miss), she said she preferred maître (Master), the formal French way to address a lawyer, male or female.
She was voted in as a member of the French parliament in 1981, when the socialist Mitterrand won a general election, but she came up against misogyny in parliament and in 1984 found an escape route when she was named French ambassador to UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.
Advertisement
Faux died in 2017. Survivors include two sons from her first marriage, Serge Halimi, an editorial director at Le Monde, and Jean-Yves Halimi, a lawyer; and a son from her second marriage, Emmanuel Faux, a broadcast journalist. She was awarded France’s Légion d’Honneur in 2006.
Retired from law, she wrote several books, including a memoir about her relationship with her mother. In it, she wrote: “Everything I am, everything I have done is, perhaps, due to the fact that my mother did not love me.”
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this obituary incorrectly reported that abortion was decriminalized in France in 1975 under President Jacques Chirac. It was decriminalized under President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, under whom Chirac served as prime minister. The obituary has been updated.
Read more Washington Post obituaries
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZLmwr8ClZqiamanCor7Inqpon5mosq2xjKGYpaGdnnqnvsSnmqFlmKq6orqMq6CgoKSoeq2t1rKcq2WUnrK0ecCtZHJrX2d9c3yOaW9oamBkhKOxj55rcWhdmn9ysoxqaJ6ZXW1%2BeX2Mb2dvnWZlgKOukJxrmKukpL%2B6esetpKU%3D