Simone Veil, the former minister and Holocaust survivor who led the battle to legalise abortion in France, will be buried in the Panthéon today with all the pomp and symbolism the French republic can muster, reports The Guardian.
Veil’s death last year sparked a wave of emotion in France, with thousands signing a petition requesting she be buried in the secular mausoleum, the giant marble building in Paris’s Latin quarter which has become the final resting place for the country’s most illustrious citizens.
Veil, who will be joined on her final journey by her husband Antoine, a high-ranking civil servant who died in 2013 after 67 years of marriage, will be only the fifth woman to be buried in the Panthéon. It was originally built in 1790 as a church to outdo St Peter’s Basilica in Rome and St Paul’s in London.
Veil was 16 in March 1944 when she was arrested in Nice by the occupying German forces just days after passing her baccalaureat. She was deported with her family to the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. They were later moved to a second camp at Bergen-Belsen, where Veil’s mother Yvonne died of typhus shortly before the camp’s liberation by British forces in April 1945. Her father and brother were last seen on a prisoner transport bound for Lithuania, but never returned. Simone and her sisters, Madeleine and Denise, survived the war, but Madeleine, the eldest, died in a car crash in the 1950s.
Returning to France after the war, Veil studied law and political science at Sciences Po university and began campaigning for European reconciliation and women’s rights. In 1974 she won what many saw as her biggest political and personal victory by convincing the Assemblée Nationale to legalise abortion despite bitter opposition in what was at the time still a fundamentally Catholic country.