Published: 9 July 2018
Last updated: 4 March 2024
Veil was by any measure a remarkable woman. Born Simone Jacob in 1927, she was deported as a teenager, via the French transit camp at Drancy, to Auschwitz and then Bergen Belsen along with one of her sisters, Madeleine, and her mother; she and Madeleine survived; their mother died of typhus in Bergen Belsen. (Her other sister, Denise, worked for the resistance and died in France. Her father and brother were deported and never heard of again.)
She returned to France after the Liberation, studied law and met Antoine Veil at the prestigious Parisian university Sciences Po. They couple soon married and went on to have three sons.
Veil’s desire to work ran counter to French post-war culture which, in spite of feminists like Simone de Beauvoir, retained a deep-seated, old-fashioned, Catholic suspicion of women in positions of any kind of influence. But she was ambitious and clever.
Her early training as a judge led to her being asked to head several major government commissions and then to her appointment by president Giscard d’Estaing as minister of health (ministerial posts in the French government are not necessarily held by members of the National Assembly).
Later, she became the first elected president of the European Parliament. Before she retired in 1982, she was appointed to the Conseil Constitutionel, France’s highest constitutional authority.
Antoine, too, had political ambitions, but, as French President Emmanuel Macron tactfully pointed out in his speech on July 1 at the interment ceremony, he gave them up to support his wife in hers. They are buried alongside one another in the Pantheon. There is, in the republic, no higher honour or distinction.
There are only two other married couples buried there, one of which is Pierre and Marie Curie; Antoine is the first man to be buried there alongside his wife, as opposed to the other way around.
Veil is probably best known for the Loi Veil, the law she wrote in 1975 that made abortion legal. During the long debates before it was passed, she was vilified by many on the right and suffered violent verbal attacks, often using the Holocaust as a vicious trope.
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In today’s dark times, when women’s reproductive rights are again under threat in the US, it is salutary to recall Veil’s bravery in standing so steadfastly for women’s rights in a country that was largely governed by closed-minded, conservative men.
Since her death, posters portraying her image, saying simply “Merci, Simone,” have proliferated on walls in cities around the country, and particularly in Paris.
One of Veil’s achievements, perhaps less known, is that she was decisive in pushing for Jewish Holocaust survivors to be recognised as such. For many years after the war, France emphasised recognition of those who had worked for the resistance, many of whom were awarded medals for their bravery.
Yet for several decades the fact that so many thousands of Jews had been deported from France and murdered because they were Jews was barely talked about. Veil worked tirelessly to increase awareness of the Holocaust and was an indefatigable advocate of the importance of Holocaust education in schools.
Today she’s seen as a symbol of all that progressive France is proud of – a ferociously intelligent and fearless stateswoman in a country that still rarely sees women in high political office; a woman who lived through the darkest period of the 20th century yet refused to see herself as a victim; a devoted wife and mother and an impassioned campaigner for women’s rights.
She was, very unusually, revered on all sides of the political spectrum.
As some have pointed out, the moving scenes at last week at Paris’s Shoah Memorial, where she and Antoine lay in state for two days before the ceremony at the Pantheon, as well as on the day itself when the ceremony was broadcast live on French television and thousands lined the streets, almost felt like a funeral for the ideals that brought the European Union into existence after the war.
With populism on the rise, borders being erected and hatreds fanned, Madame Veil’s panthéoniseé felt like a solemn homage not only to her, but to the noblest of aspirations, that of building a better, safer world for all of our children.
Main photo: French President Emmanuel Macron, rear, delivered a speech at the ceremony (Ludovic Marin/AP)
