Robert Badinter, a French lawyer and former justice minister who led the fight to abolish the death penalty in France and became one of the country’s most respected intellectual figures, died early Friday. He was 95.
His death was confirmed by Aude Napoli, his spokeswoman. She did not say where he died.
“He is a touchstone for many generations,” President Emmanuel Macron told reporters on a visit to Bordeaux on Friday, hailing Mr. Badinter as a “sage” and a “conscience” for France.
“The nation owes him a lot,” Mr. Macron said, adding that the government would organize a national tribute.
Mr. Badinter spent decades as an esteemed defense lawyer. But he was best known for enacting the 1981 law that abolished capital punishment in France, one of his very first acts as justice minister in the Socialist government of President François Mitterrand.
“Tomorrow, thanks to you, France’s justice will no longer be a justice that kills,” Mr. Badinter told lawmakers in 1981 in a fiery hourslong speech defending the law.
He achieved this in the face of wide public support for the death penalty at the time. The fight against capital punishment stood at the core of his lifelong defense of human rights against oppression and cruelty. It was also under Mr. Badinter’s watch, in 1982, that France decriminalized homosexuality.
In “The Execution,” a 1973 book, he vividly recalled “the sharp snap” of the guillotine blade as he witnessed the execution of one of his clients, an inmate sentenced to death for complicity in the murder of a guard and a nurse after a hostage-taking in prison.
That traumatizing experience led Mr. Badinter to crusade against the death penalty. Decades later, in a 2010 interview with The New York Times, he still referred to the guillotine as “my old enemy.”
Mr. Badinter was justice minister from 1981 to 1986. He then became the president of France’s Constitutional Council, a position he held for nine years. The council is the institution that reviews laws to ensure that they conform with the Constitution.
He also served in the Senate as a Socialist lawmaker from 1995 to 2011, and for many, especially on the left, he progressively came to resemble the conscience of the republic, a fervent defender of the rule of law.
“Deeply committed to justice, an advocate of abolition, a man of law and passion, he leaves a void that matches his legacy: immeasurable,” Éric Dupond-Moretti, France’s justice minister — and a longtime defense lawyer himself — said on social media.
Mr. Dupond-Moretti later announced that the justice ministry would exceptionally be open to the public until Sunday, allowing people to come sign a book of condolences.
Robert Badinter was born on March 30, 1928, in Paris to Jewish immigrants from Bessarabia, a region in Eastern Europe that now straddles Moldova and Ukraine. He was raised to respect the liberal values and tolerance of the French republic.
But in 1943, when he was 15, his father, Simon, was deported from Lyon; he never returned from the Nazi death camps. Several other members of his family, including one of his grandmothers, were also killed by the Nazis.
The lesson for Mr. Badinter was not that the promises of the republic were empty but that constant vigilance was needed to honor and defend them. The wartime Vichy government in France, which collaborated with the Nazis in the deportation of Jews, constituted the ultimate betrayal of the republic.
Defining himself as “republican, secular and Jewish,” he carried within him for the rest of his long life the mark of his family’s loss in a moment of French betrayal.
“I am French, a French Jew — the two cannot be disassociated,” he told Le Monde in 2018. “These are not just words, this is the lived reality.”
Mr. Badinter and other family members fled to a small town in the French Alps, where residents sheltered them. After the war, he studied literature and law in Paris and received a Master of Arts from Columbia University in New York. He started his career as a lawyer in 1951 and later, while teaching university classes, battled to help several convicts avoid the death penalty.
As justice minister, Mr. Badinter abolished special courts that operated outside the normal framework of the law — like one that judged only crimes against the state — and passed reforms to improve living conditions in prison, even as opponents on the right and the far right railed against him as being too lenient with criminals.
Mr. Badinter was part of a government that refashioned the Socialist Party as a center-left movement and abandoned the wholesale nationalization of industries. But his death comes at a time when the country has lurched right and the party’s influence has radically diminished.
He was particularly close to Mr. Mitterrand, who turned to Mr. Badinter in 1984 to countersign, in strict secrecy, the document in which the president recognized Mazarine Pingeot, his daughter from an adulterous relationship.
Mr. Badinter’s first marriage was to Anne Vernon, a French actress. He is survived by his second wife, Élisabeth Badinter, a French philosopher and author who is vice chair of the supervisory board at Publicis, an advertising and public relations firm, and by their three children.
To the last, Mr. Badinter prodded France to assume its responsibilities in the quest for universal human dignity and peace. In his last interview, 10 months ago, he alluded to the conflict in Ukraine, telling France Inter radio, “We French, we do not realize enough that there is a war in Europe.”