A daughter nobody celebrated
Zeiza Gisèle Élise Taïeb was born on July 27, 1927, in La Goulette, a port suburb of Tunis in what was then French-ruled Tunisia. Her family was Jewish, observant and poor. Her father, Édouard Taïeb, had started out as an errand boy in a law office and worked his way up to notary's clerk. Her mother, Fortunée Mettoudi, known as Fritna, came from a family of Spanish Sephardic origin and was deeply religious.
The family had hoped for a boy. Her father was so disappointed at having a daughter that he waited weeks before telling friends and neighbors about her birth. Inside the household, girls were expected to serve the men at table, make their brothers' beds and do the chores their brothers were spared. Gisèle refused. As a child she went on hunger strike to protest the rule that she wait on her brothers, and her parents gave in. She later remembered writing in her diary that she had won her first bit of freedom.
She was a gifted student in a school system that admitted few poor children, while her brothers struggled. Her parents showed little interest in her success. As a teenager she refused an arranged marriage to a much older merchant and pushed instead to continue her education. She also saw, early on, the contempt that colonial society showed toward Tunisia's Arab population, and she heard antisemitic insults at school. Historians of her life link both experiences to the causes she would take up as an adult: equality for women and freedom for colonized peoples.
From Tunis to the Paris bar
After finishing secondary school in Tunis she left for Paris, where she studied law and philosophy at the Sorbonne and also took classes at Sciences Po. She paid part of her way by working as a telephone operator. She qualified as a lawyer in 1948 and joined the Tunis bar in 1949, the same year she married Paul Halimi, a civil servant. The marriage ended in divorce, but she kept his surname, by then the name under which she was known professionally. In 1961 she married Claude Faux, who had been secretary to the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. She had three sons.
Her early cases in Tunis were modest ones, followed by the defense of trade unionists and Tunisian independence activists. In 1956 she moved to Paris and joined the bar there. From the start she insisted on calling herself an avocate, the feminine form of the word for lawyer, rather than the masculine avocat. When a colleague complained that this signaled a feminist agenda, the head of the bar declined to make her change it.
Defending the accused in the Algerian war
During the Algerian War of Independence, Halimi became one of a small number of lawyers willing to defend Algerians prosecuted by French courts, including members of the National Liberation Front (FLN). Her clients included people convicted on the strength of confessions obtained under duress, and she worked to expose falsified autopsy reports. The work brought her death threats, and she was briefly detained in Algiers. Two colleagues who worked on similar cases were assassinated.
Her most famous case of that era began in 1960. Djamila Boupacha, a young FLN activist, was accused of planting a bomb in an Algiers café. While in military custody she was tortured and raped by French soldiers. Halimi built the defense on the argument that a confession obtained by torture was worthless. With her client's consent, she made the rape public and filed a criminal complaint. She went further, bringing a complaint against the armed forces minister and the commander of French forces in Algeria for violating her client's constitutional rights, and she obtained the transfer of the case to a court in Caen, in mainland France.
Simone de Beauvoir took up the cause in the newspaper Le Monde, and in 1962 she and Halimi published a book, Djamila Boupacha, that carried a portrait of the young woman drawn by Pablo Picasso. Boupacha had been sentenced to death in 1961, but she was amnestied under the Évian Accords that ended the war and released in April 1962. The case became one of the best known exposures of torture during the conflict and helped turn French public opinion. Halimi's role in the war divided opinion in France at the time, and she defended her choices in public for years afterward.
Human rights beyond France
Halimi saw her legal work as part of a wider defense of human rights. In 1967 she took part in the Russell Tribunal, the citizens' inquiry organized by Bertrand Russell and Sartre into the conduct of the war in Vietnam, and chaired one of its commissions of inquiry. In 1971 the International Federation for Human Rights sent her to Spain to observe the Burgos trial of Basque activists under the Franco dictatorship, and she wrote a book about it with a preface by Sartre.
She also campaigned against the death penalty and for the right of women to contraception. Throughout these cases she developed what became her trademark method: using a single trial to speak beyond the judges to the whole of society, so that a courtroom became a public argument for changing an unjust law.
The Bobigny trial and the right to choose
Abortion was a crime in France under a law dating from 1920. Women with money could travel abroad or find a discreet doctor; poorer women risked their health and their lives in clandestine procedures. Halimi had undergone an illegal abortion herself at 19, performed brutally and without anesthetic. In April 1971 she was the only lawyer among the signers of the Manifesto of the 343, in which well known women declared publicly that they had had abortions and demanded the right to contraception and abortion. That same year, with Simone de Beauvoir, the biologist Jean Rostand and others, she founded the association Choisir la cause des femmes (Choose the Cause of Women) to defend any signer who might be prosecuted and to campaign for changing the law.
The case that changed everything came in 1972. Marie-Claire Chevalier, a 16-year-old from the Paris suburbs, had become pregnant after being raped by a classmate. Her mother, a single parent who worked on the Paris metro, and other women helped her obtain an abortion, and they were charged along with her. Halimi took the case and turned the trial in Bobigny into a trial of the 1920 law itself. She called scientists, including Nobel laureates, as well as writers and actresses to testify, and in her closing speech she spoke openly about her own abortion.
Marie-Claire was acquitted. Two friends who had helped her were also acquitted, and her mother received only a suspended sentence. The verdicts were reported across France and showed that the law no longer had public support. Two years later Health Minister Simone Veil steered through the law that legalized abortion, passed in December 1974 and promulgated in January 1975. Halimi's Bobigny trial is widely credited as one of the decisive steps on that road.
Making rape a crime in practice
In the 1970s, French law nominally treated rape as a serious crime, but its definition was so narrow that most cases were reclassified as indecent assault and tried as lesser offenses, if they were tried at all. Victims were routinely blamed and humiliated. In 1974 two young Belgian women, Anne Tonglet and Araceli Castellano, were attacked and raped by three men while camping near Marseille. Halimi represented them and fought to have the case heard by the Court of Assizes, which tries the most serious crimes, rather than a lower court.
The trial took place in Aix-en-Provence in 1978 amid insults and threats against the victims and their lawyer. Halimi again made the courtroom a public debate. The three defendants were convicted, the leader receiving six years and the others four. The public debate the trial provoked contributed directly to the law of December 23, 1980, which gave rape a broad, modern definition in French law: any act of sexual penetration of any kind committed by violence, coercion or surprise. That definition, which made the absence of consent the heart of the crime, has protected victims in France for more than four decades.
Parliament, UNESCO and the fight for parity
In 1981 Halimi was elected to the National Assembly for the fourth constituency of Isère, sitting with the Socialist group. In her three years as a deputy she served as rapporteur, alongside Justice Minister Robert Badinter, for the 1982 law that ended the separate, higher age of consent for same-sex relations, a distinction dating from the Vichy regime. With Badinter she also rewrote the oath taken by French lawyers, removing requirements to respect public authorities and good morals and leaving the shorter oath still used today, which binds lawyers to dignity, conscience, independence, probity and humanity. She proposed the first legal quota for women on municipal election lists in 1982; it passed but was struck down by the Constitutional Council.
She left the Assembly in 1984 and served as France's ambassador to UNESCO from 1985 to 1986, then chaired its Committee on Conventions and Recommendations. She later advised the French delegation to the UN General Assembly and worked as a rapporteur on equality between women and men in political life. In 1995 she helped create France's Observatory for Parity between Women and Men, whose first report argued for quotas or parity in law. The idea she had championed for decades won out in 1999, when the French Constitution was amended to state that the law promotes equal access of women and men to elected office.
In her later years she was a founding member of the anti-globalization association ATTAC, opposed the 2005 European constitutional treaty, and supported the Palestinian cause, including joining the sponsoring committee of the 2009 Russell Tribunal on Palestine. These political positions drew both support and criticism. She also campaigned through Choisir for a 'most favored European woman' clause, the idea that every woman in the European Union should enjoy the best women's rights law found in any member state.
Jewish roots
Halimi was born into an observant Jewish family in Tunisia. Her father was of Berber Jewish origin and her mother, whose piety Halimi described in her 1999 memoir Fritna, descended from Spanish Sephardic Jews. As a schoolgirl in colonial Tunisia she encountered antisemitism, and biographers suggest this, along with the racism she saw directed at Arabs, shaped her lifelong hostility to discrimination of every kind.
As an adult she did not practice the religion of her childhood and lived a secular life. Her funeral in Paris in 2020 was a secular ceremony. She remained attached to Tunisia all her life, kept its nationality and returned there often.
Legacy
Gisèle Halimi died in Paris on July 28, 2020, the day after her 93rd birthday. Her legacy is written into French law. Women in France have the legal right to end a pregnancy, a right that the Bobigny trial helped win and that France wrote into its Constitution in 2024. Rape victims are protected by the broad definition adopted in 1980, which grew out of the Aix trial. French elections are governed by parity rules that she was among the first to demand, and French lawyers swear the oath she helped rewrite.
France has honored her repeatedly. President Emmanuel Macron took part in a ceremony in her honor on International Women's Day in March 2023, and a statue of her was among the ten statues of women unveiled during the opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympics. Her defense of Marie-Claire Chevalier has been retold on stage, on television and in film. Above all, she showed how a single lawyer, choosing the right case and speaking past the judges to the public, could change the law for millions of women.
Sources & further reading
Gisèle Halimi, Wikipedia · Gisèle Halimi, Wikipédia (French) · HALIMI Gisèle, Le Maitron (biographical dictionary of the French labor and social movement) · Gisèle Halimi: Lawyer and French women's rights activist, The Independent (via Yahoo News) · Gisèle Halimi: A courageous anti-colonialist and feminist lawyer, International Viewpoint · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
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