A Funeral for a Vision of Europe
PARIS—On Friday morning, news was just trickling in from a heated European Union summit on immigration whose pre-dawn result seemed to be a tightening of borders and the creation of centers to “process” would-be arrivals before they dared inch toward Europe. Headlines from America were of children separated from their parents at the Mexican border and how Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement might affect abortion rights. And at the Memorial of the Shoah here in Paris, people were paying their respects to Simone Veil.
Veil, who died last year at 89, is an icon in France whose life spoke to the worst and best of Europe’s 20th century. Born in Nice in 1927, deported to Auschwitz at 16, she survived, studied law, became a magistrate, fought for European reconciliation, was the first woman president of the European Parliament, and as France’s health minister in 1974, wrote the law that legalized abortion. For this, her face has adorned posters across France that read simply, “Merci, Simone.”
Veil’s coffin and that on Sunday in which President Emmanuel Macron installed them in the Panthéon, the country’s memorial to its illustrious dead. A picture of Veil and her husband hung from large banners on its façade, flanked by the flags of France and the European Union. The “,” as it’s called, was broadcast live on state television with all the solemnity of the funeral of a head of state. Newspapers every step.
