It is a tribute to the feminist lawyer who died in 2020 and who is to receive a national tribute at the beginning of 2022. The PS mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo inaugurated Tuesday on the left bank of the banks of the Seine the promenade Gisèle Halimi, located between the bridge des Invalides and the Alma bridge, in the district where the activist for the emancipation of peoples and women’s rights resided.
The walk will be an invitation to “meditate on his example”, declared Anne Hidalgo in the presence in particular of elected Parisians and the former Socialist Minister of the Interior Pierre Joxe. “This is what I will not fail to do when I have important decisions to take,” concluded the probable PS candidate for the presidential election.
“Her path, she built it by carrying loud and clear these great subjects of the past century (…) which still impact us today”, said the elected socialist, recalling the fight of Gisèle Halimi against colonization, its defense of “the weakest, the oppressed, the despised” and its fight “for women and for equality”.
“Founding and vital republican convictions”
The one who denounced the tortures practiced during the Algerian War, signed the manifesto of 343 in 1971 and changed mentalities through her pleadings died on July 28, 2020 in Paris, the day after her 93rd birthday. Rachida Dati, LR mayor of the 7th arrondissement where the promenade is located, greeted a personality with “founding and vital republican convictions” and who, “throughout her life, led her life as a woman, a lawyer, activist and feminist ”.
Jean-Yves Halimi, one of the lawyer’s sons, recalled “the irony of history” that constitutes for him the tribute announced by Emmanuel Macron for early 2022 at the Invalides, a “military enclosure” while his mother “escaped two assassination attempts ordered by the top French military hierarchy”. After this national tribute, a possible pantheonization of the lawyer remains possible, but it is a longer and more complex process.
In October 2020, the Paris Council requested, on a proposal from the Communist group, that Gisèle Halimi rest in the Panthéon which welcomes the heroes of French history, including Simone Veil since 2018. The Franco-American artist Joséphine Baker will enter there. November 30.