This is the best summary I could come up with:

In 1981, Badinter went against public opinion to push through legislation banning capital punishment, which at the time was carried out by beheading with the guillotine, a practice dating back to the French Revolution of 1789.

In 1943 his father was among many Jewish people rounded up by the Gestapo in the southeastern city of Lyon and deported to the Sobibor concentration camp in modern-day Poland, where he was killed in the gas chambers.

Known as the “butcher of Lyon”, Barbie was put on trial for crimes against humanity and sentenced to life imprisonment in a landmark case during which Holocaust survivors took the stand for the first time in France.

Catherine Prevost-Meyniac, 54, an economics and eco-management professor from Angers, had travelled to Paris to sign the condolences book and attend the memorial ceremony.

She said: “I was 12 years old when he gave his speech at the national assembly [calling for the abolition of the death penalty] and I remember it was the first time I saw my father cry.

Her daughter Victorine, 25, an archivist, said: “France was very late to abolish the death penalty and it was Robert Badinter who argued for another kind of republic.

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