Jacques Isorni

Jacques Isorni (born July 3, 1911 in Paris , † May 8, 1995 ibid) was a French lawyer .

Isorni was the son of a fashion designer originally from Ticino. He attended the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris and then studied law. In 1931 he was admitted to the Paris bar. During the occupation he defended communists before the tribunals of the Vichy regime and after the liberation, conversely, collaborators and alleged collaborators, such as the former editor of "Je suis partout" (the newspaper appeared from 1930 to 1944) Robert Brasillach , who was sentenced to death in January 1945 and was executed shortly afterwards . From July 1945 he took over Fernand Payen (the chairman of the Bar Association) and Jean Lemaire defending Marshal Pétain , but was sentenced to death, what of Charles de Gaulle in life imprisonment was converted (Petain died in 1951 in prison). His defense speech was seen in France as a prime example of legal eloquence. Even after his conviction and long after his death, he tirelessly tried to have the process revised and was one of the founders of an association dedicated to this purpose.

In 1951 he went into politics (as a deputy from Paris) with the sole aim of achieving a partial amnesty for collaborators or alleged collaborators from the time of the Second World War and the Vichy regime. This partial amnesty was issued in 1953. He then defended Tunisian insurgents in particular before the French military courts . After his re-election in 1956, he made it his main task to abolish the death penalty . He stayed in Parliament until 1958 when he was the only right-wing MP to vote against de Gaulle. As a supporter of Algeria remaining in France, he defended General Bigot in 1961, who was involved in the “coup of the generals”. In 1963 he defended one of the conspirators (Jacques Prévost) who carried out an assassination attempt on General de Gaulle in Petit-Clamart in August 1962 before the military court. As a result of the trial, he was banned from attorney for three years for improper behavior (he filed a petition for bias against one of the military judges and read a few passages from his letters for this purpose). In 1976 he was able to get the case against the suspect François Marcantoni , a prominent criminal, in the Marković affair . He was also a defender in 1969 in the murder trial of some members of the Corsican Guérini family, which dominated the underworld of Marseilles until the end of the 1960s .

Isorni also wrote history books and some plays.

literature

• Jacques Isorni: Mémoires. 3 volumes. Robert Laffont, Paris 1984–1986.
• Alice Kaplan: Intelligence avec l'ennemi. Le procès Robert Brasillach. Gallimard, Paris 2001, ISBN 2-07-075909-1 .
• Gilles Antonowicz: Jacques Isorni. L'avocat de tous les combats. (Foreword by Roland Dumas ). France-Empire, Paris 2007, ISBN 978-2-7048-1036-9 .

Remarks

1. ↑ Gudrun Eussner on the Brasillach case
2. ↑ Brasillach denounced resistance fighters, Jews in hiding, etc. in his newspaper. a. with name and address, pleaded for the extermination of the Jews and wrote German-friendly articles.
3. ↑ The main conspirator Jean Bastien-Thiry was defended by Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour . He was executed by firing squad in 1963 in Fort d´Ivry.