Gisèle Halimi: Lawyer and French women’s rights activist

A contemporary of De Beauvoir, the Tunisian native was instrumental in the fight to decriminalise abortion in France

Halimi leads a debate in Le Havre, 1978 (AFP/Getty)

To most, the words “influential French feminist” probably conjure Simone de Beauvoir. Perhaps fewer outside France have heard of Gisèle Halimi, a contemporary French feminist, intellectual and campaigning lawyer. But Halimi, who died at her home in Paris in July just a day after turning 93, co-founded a women’s rights organisation with De Beauvoir: Choisir La Cause des Femmes, in 1971. De Beauvoir also wrote the introduction to Halimi’s first book, pleading the case of Djamila Boupacha, a 22-year-old Algerian woman and survivor of rape.

In 1961, at the height of the Algerian war for independence, the nationalist Boupacha was charged with the attempted bombing of a cafe, and was raped and tortured in French custody. Halimi represented her, and Boupacha was given amnesty and freed. Boupacha even posed for Picasso, with the drawing forming the cover of the book.

But for Halimi, the fight for gender equality began at birth. When she arrived, on 27 July 1927 in La Goulette, a port suburb of Tunis, Tunisia, her father wasn’t pleased with his daughter. Edouard, a legal clerk and strict Berber patriarch, was disappointed that his wife, a Jewish homemaker named Fortunée (known as Fritna), had not provided the boy he wanted. Annick Cojean, a senior reporter at Le Monde who co-wrote the recently published Une Farouche Liberté (A Fierce Freedom) with Halimi, remembers the feminist saying that Edouard didn’t share the news of her birth for several weeks.

When she was only 10, Halimi went on hunger strike to protest against the custom of serving her brothers their meals. She starved herself for eight days, until her parents agreed to treat the children equally. She wrote in her diary: “I have gained my first bit of freedom.” She would later describe it as her “first feminist victory”.

Halimi studied at a lycée in Tunis as a teenager, and again stood her ground when her parents tried to have her marry a man more than twice her age – his main recommendation being that he owned three cars. She won a scholarship to stay in school, then moved to Paris for university, studying law and philosophy. When she qualified as a lawyer, she practised at the Tunis bar for eight years, before returning to Paris in 1956. That year, she married Paul Halimi, but it would quickly end in divorce. In 1961, she married Claude Faux, former personal secretary to Jean-Paul Sartre, partner of De Beauvoir.  

Halimi began to make a name for herself as a prominent human rights activist, representing several torture victims in former French colonies like Algeria and her native Tunisia. In 1967, Halimi joined Bertrand Russell and Sartre on the Russell Tribunal, which investigated American military actions in Vietnam. The tribunal eventually found the United States guilty of multiple war crimes.

Halimi, along with hundreds of other influential French women, achieved notoriety by signing the “manifesto of the 343”, an open letter written by De Beauvoir in April 1971, describing their abortions – then illegal in France except in cases where the woman’s life was in danger. The magazine Charlie Hebdo dubbed them “the 343 sluts”.

In France, 1972, a teenage girl from the Parisian suburbs named Marie-Claire Chevalier was raped by a classmate. When she became pregnant, she, her mother and three friends scraped together the money to pay for an abortion. The five were charged under the 1920 law. With Halimi’s representation, Chevalier was acquitted, and the case – which had become known as the Bobigny trial – formed a milestone in the move towards decriminalisation of abortion in France, which occurred in 1975.

Throughout the 1980s, she would serve in the French National Assembly and as the French ambassador to Unesco. She also campaigned for the abolition of the death penalty, access to contraception, and helped to toughen up laws against rape.

According to the lawyer and author Emmanuel Pierrat, judges would expect Halimi to act “like a crazy woman” in court. But, he told The New York Times, “As soon as she started to talk, everybody was silent. She had a commanding presence.”

She went on to contribute to several books and publish 10 of her own, including Fritna, a memoir of her mother. “Everything I am, everything I have done,” Halimi wrote, “is, perhaps, due to the fact that my mother did not love me.”

She is survived by her sons, a radio journalist named Emmanuel, Jean-Yves, a lawyer, and Serge, a director of a newspaper, as well as two grandchildren, but she always said she would have liked a daughter.

She told Le Monde in 2011: “I would have liked to know if, when raising her, I would be exactly conforming to what I demanded for myself and for all women. It’s not easy being a girl today, perhaps even more so than before because she would be confronted with a world that has not disappeared; that of prejudices and violence.”

Gisèle Halimi, feminist activist and lawyer, born 27 July 1927, died 28 July 2020