Simone Veil

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Simone Veil (1984)

Simone Veil (pronunciation: [si.mɔn vɛj] listen ? / I ; * July 13, 1927 in Nice as Simone Jacob ; † June 30, 2017 in Paris ) was a French politician and Holocaust survivor. Audio file / audio sample

From 1974 to 1979 she was French Minister of Health. In that position she was responsible for the abortion law in 1975 , hence known as loi Veil . From 1979 to 1993 she was a member of the European Parliament and from 1979 to 1982 its President . From 1993 to 1995 she was France's Minister of Social Affairs. From 1998 to 2007, Veil was a member of the Constitutional Council . From November 20, 2008 she was a member of the Académie française .

Life

Youth and Shoah

Simone Veil was the daughter of the architect André Jacob , who spent several years as a prisoner of war during the First World War. Her mother Yvonne Steinmetz was an atheist and gave up her chemistry studies at her husband's request to devote herself to the family. The family was Jewish and proud of Judaism for cultural reasons, but not religious, but secular, republican and patriotic.

In 1944, Veil and her family were arrested by the Gestapo . She was interrogated at the Gestapo headquarters, the Hotel "Excelsior". Her father and brother Jean were deported to Lithuania and died there. Her sister Denise was in the Resistance , was deported to the Ravensbrück concentration camp , but was able to survive. Simone, her mother and her other sister Madeleine, called Milou, were deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. She survived the selection on arrival in Auschwitz because she pretended to be 18 years old; it was given the prisoner number 78651. They survived eight months in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. In January 1945 they made the death march from Auschwitz to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp . Her mother Yvonne Jacob died on March 15, 1945 in Bergen-Belsen from the typhus epidemic that was rampant there. Shortly afterwards, on April 15, 1945, Simone and her sister Milou were liberated by British forces in Bergen-Belsen.

Professional background

Simone Veil studied law and graduated from the Institut d'études politiques de Paris (Sciences Po). In 1956 she was appointed a judge. She subsequently served as a senior civil servant in the Department of Justice in the French Ministry of Justice. From 1969 she was a member of the cabinet of Justice Minister René Pleven . In 1970 she was the first woman to become general secretary of the Conseil supérieur de la magistrature , the supervisory authority of the French judiciary consisting of members of the judiciary. From 1972 to 1974 she was a member of the board of directors of the Office de Radiodiffusion Télévision Française (ORTF).

Minister of Health and loi Veil

During Valéry Giscard d'Estaing's presidency , she was a member of the Jacques Chirac and Raymond Barres Cabinets as Minister of Health from 1974 to 1979 . After Germaine Poinso-Chapuis, she was the second woman to hold a ministerial post in France. In her role as Minister of Health, she ensured easier access to contraceptives - the sale of contraceptives such as the pill was not legalized in France until 1967. Most closely associated with her name, however, is her tough fight to legalize abortion in France. A law regulating time limits was passed by the French Parliament on January 17, 1975 and is known as the Loi Veil ("Veil Law").

European Parliament

Simone Veil in the European Parliament, 1979

After leaving the government for the first time, she ran for the UDF as the top candidate in the first European elections in 1979 . In this election, the UDF was the strongest force in France with 27.6%. Veil joined - like most of the UDF MEPs - the Liberal and Democratic Group (LD). The European Parliament elected Veil as President on July 17, 1979 . She was the first woman to hold this office. Due to an intergroup agreement, she resigned from this office in the middle of the five-year legislative period on January 18, 1982. (The presidency of the European Parliament has lasted two and a half years to this day.) His successor was the Dutch socialist Piet Dankert . She was then deputy chairman of the Liberal Group.

In the European elections in 1984 she was again the top candidate, this time on a joint list of the UDF and the Gaullist RPR , which received 43% of the vote. In the legislative period up to 1989 Veil was chairman of the LD parliamentary group. In the European elections in 1989 Veil ran at the head of the list Le Center pour l'Europe , which was mainly supported by the Christian Democratic CDS and ran against the official list of the UDF and RPR. From Veil's point of view, the RPR did not advocate European integration decisively enough. Their list came in at 8.4%, while the UDF-RPR list suffered significant losses. Unlike the other elected on her list, Veil did not join the Christian Democratic EPP group , but remained in the liberal group, of which she was deputy chair until she left the European Parliament in March 1993.

Minister of State and Constitutional Council

Veil during a panel discussion in 2008

Under Prime Minister Édouard Balladur , she was French Minister for Social Affairs, Health and Urban Affairs with the rank of Ministre d'État between 1993 and 1995 .

From 1998 to 2007 Veil was a member of the Conseil constitutionnel , ie the French constitutional court. Simone Veil spoke in front of the German Bundestag on the occasion of the commemoration day for the commemoration of the victims of National Socialism in 2004 .

In 2008, Veil was elected a member of the Académie française , which is dedicated to maintaining the French language. Her seat there was Fauteuil 13, on which the poet Racine also sat; she took over this seat on March 18, 2010. In October 2012 she took part in the founding congress of the Union des démocrates et indépendants (UDI).

Honors

During his lifetime

In 1981 Simone Veil was awarded the International Charlemagne Prize of the city of Aachen “for a democratic Europe”. In 1988 she received the Thomas Dehler Prize , in 2005 the Prince of Asturias Prize , and in 2008 the European Charles V Prize of the European Academy of Yuste in Spain and is the recipient of the award: Mérite Européen .

In Wiesbaden , in the mid-1990s, a street was named after Simone Veil in the Europaviertel (a former US military site), and in 2019, Simone-Veil-Gasse was named in Vienna- Floridsdorf .

The Franco-German Journalism Prize (DFJP) awarded Simone Veil the Great Media Prize in 2009.

In 2010 she was awarded the Heinrich Heine Prize of the city of Düsseldorf and the European Civil Rights Prize of the Sinti and Roma , and in 2011 the Schiller Prize of the city of Marbach am Neckar .

Posthumously

On July 5, 2017, Veil was honored with a state ceremony and military honors in the courtyard of the Hôtel des Invalides , whereupon she was buried next to her husband, who died in 2013, at the Cimetière Montparnasse . President Emmanuel Macron , survivors of the Holocaust, politicians and guests of honor were present at the ceremony . In his speech, Macron announced that the remains of Veil and her husband would be reburied in the Panthéon .

On July 1, 2018, the transfer ceremony to the Panthéon took place in Paris. In addition to the incumbent President and his wife, the participants included, among others, Macron's predecessors in office François Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy , Prime Minister Edouard Philippe , former Prime Minister Edith Cresson , President of the Île-de-France region, Valérie Pécresse , and the couple Serge and Beate Klarsfeld . The funeral procession led from the Mémorial de la Shoah in the 4th arrondissement via the Île Saint-Louis to the left bank of the Seine and via the streets Quai de la Tournelle , Boulevard Saint-Michel and Rue Soufflot to the final resting place. In his celebratory speech, Macron emphasized the connections between Simone Veil's work and that of the men who are buried in the same vault as her: Jean Moulin , André Malraux , Jean Monnet and René Cassin . He added:

«Avec Simone Veil entrent ici des générations de femme qui ont fait la France. Qu'aujourd'hui, par elle, justice leur soit toutes rendue. »

“With Simone Veil, generations of women who created France are joining us. May justice be done to them all through them today. "

After Macron's speech, Veil's friend, singer Barbara Hendricks , accompanied by the choir of the Garde républicaine , intoned the Marseillaise .

Veil was the fifth woman to join the 76 “great personalities” buried in the Panthéon.

Also in July 2018, 15 million copies of a two-euro commemorative coin with Simone Veil's image were put into circulation in France. The coin shows Veil's face and her prisoner number in the concentration camp against the background of the plenary chamber of the European Parliament.

Private

Simone Veil was married to the manager and civil servant Antoine Veil (1926-2013) since 1946 , with whom she had three sons. In the 1950s she lived in Germany for a while with her husband, who worked at the consulate in Wiesbaden. Two of her three sons, Jean (* 1947) and Pierre-François (* 1954), are lawyers.

Biographies

Talk

Web links

Commons : Simone Veil  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Simone Veil, deportee à Birkenau, Bergen-Belsen et Bobrek. Mémorial de la Shoah , 1997. Published on YouTube on September 15, 2016, accessed on June 30, 2017 (video 2:51 hours; French).
  2. ^ Paul Hainsworth: France. In: Juliet Lodge: The 1989 Election of the European Parliament. Palgrave Macmillan, New York 1990, pp. 126-144, at p. 132.
  3. ↑ Simone Veil immortelle. LExpress.fr , November 20, 2008, accessed June 30, 2017 (French).
  4. ↑ Simone Veil soutient l'UDI de Borloo. In: Le Figaro , October 21, 2012.
  5. ↑ French rights champion Simone Veil given coveted place in Panthéon . In: The Guardian , July 5, 2017. 
  6. ↑ France buries women's rights icon Simone Veil . In: en.rfi.fr , July 5, 2017. 
  7. ↑ Simone Veil to Be Laid to Rest in Panthéon, Among France's Revered . In: The New York Times , July 5, 2017. 
  8. ↑ a b c EN DIRECT - Simone Veil au Panthéon, la France lui rend homage. In: lefigaro.fr. July 1, 2018, accessed July 1, 2018 (French).
  9. ^ Géraldine Houdayer: Une pièce de two euros en hommage à Simone Veil. In: francebleu.fr . June 14, 2018, accessed May 12, 2019 (French).
  10. ^ New national side of euro coins in circulation . In: Official Journal of the European Union , 2018 / C 155/03.
  11. ↑ Excerpts: Simone Veil: Auschwitz and survival in hell. Translated by Antonia von Schöning. In: Welt Online , January 25, 2008, accessed on June 30, 2017.
    Review: Joseph Jurt : Simone Veil's life review     : From the concentration camp experience to European politics. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung , February 1, 2008, accessed June 30, 2017.
personal data
SURNAME Veil, Simone
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Jacob, Simone (former name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French politician, MEP, President of the European Parliament
DATE OF BIRTH July 13, 1927
PLACE OF BIRTH Nice
DATE OF DEATH June 30, 2017
Place of death Paris