Emmanuel Macron announces a national tribute to Gisèle Halimi in 2022 – teller report

The opposition demanded that she too, like Josephine Baker, enter the Pantheon. But Emmanuel Macron has decided: a national tribute will be paid next year to the feminist lawyer Gisèle Halimi, who died in July 2020 at the age of 93.

“Her ‘fierce freedom’, she used it to free others. Through her struggles for equality, Gisèle Halimi changed and still changes the lives of millions of women. In agreement with her family, the Nation will pay tribute to her in early 2022 at the Invalides “, announced the President of the Republic on Twitter, this Monday, August 23.

Earlier this Monday, the Élysée had confirmed the information from Parisian revealing that another prominent feminist, Franco-American artist Joséphine Baker, will enter the Pantheon on November 30.

After the revelation of the Ile-de-France newspaper, several members of the opposition quickly demanded that Gisèle Halimi suffer the same fate. “And for Gisèle Halimi, any news?”, for example tweeted the socialist senator Rachid Temal in reaction to the announcement of the upcoming pantheonization of Josephine Baker.

In his report on the colonization and the Algerian war (1954-1962), submitted in January to Emmanuel Macron, the historian Benjamin Stora had recommended the pantheonization of Gisèle Halimi, who died last July at the age of 93. This national honor is also claimed by many feminist and left activists.

Conversely, a group of women and girls of harkis, auxiliaries to the French army during the Algerian war, said they were opposed to this possibility.

Last May, a source close to the executive told AFP that the thinking was still “In progress” at the Élysée on a possible entry to the Pantheon Gisèle Halimi. France Inter, for its part, affirmed that Emmanuel Macron would probably renounce this pantheonization, in particular because the commitment of the lawyer against the war in Algeria and for the independence of this country could “cleave” and that the decision could be seen as a “insult” by certain associations of Pieds-Noirs and Harkis.

Elisabeth Moreno, the minister responsible for equality between women and men, reminded AFP that she “militated” for entry into the Pantheon by Gisèle Halimi, this “obstinate rebel (…) who marked the history of feminism and of our country”.