Macron pays tribute to anti-colonialist Tunisian-French feminist Gisèle Halimi despite opposition

France's President Emmanuel Macon paid 'national tribute' Wednesday to Tunisian-French feminist and anti-colonialist lawyer Gisèle Halimi despite solid opposition from far-right groups and Harkis.

"She felt like she was supporting, through her words and her demonstrations, what she knew about freedom and the rights promised by the (French) Republic," Macron said of Halimi's legacy in supporting the Tunisian cause and the Algerian liberation.

Passing away in 2020 at the age of 93, Halimi was a fierce defender of women's rights and the liberation of colonised people from North Africa to Palestine.

The lawyer was the first to publicly expose the rape committed by the French military against Algerian liberation militants amid their eight-year struggle for independence against French forces.

In 1960, Halimi broke the case of Djamila Boupacha, a 22-year-old Algerian militant, who was tortured and sexually assaulted until she confessed to planting a bomb in a faculty.

Halimi, thirty-three at the time, defended Boupacha's case with her body and soul, driving Paris' intellectuals as Simone de Beauvoir to advocate for the liberation of the Algerian militant.

In his speech, Emmanuel Macron evoked the tragedy of Boupacha, "Humiliation, torture, rape, had overwhelmed her," he continued, "Gisèle Halimi carried the cause of Algerian independence."

"The Algerian war must now take its full place in our memory, here in France, and in Algeria," he concluded.

Halimi's tribute was at a standstill for over two years, mainly because of the wide political opposition of the figure and her family's disaccord with Élysée and Macron's politics.

Journalist Serge Halimi, Giséle's son and a left-wing activist, boycotted the tribute, deploring that his mother would have fought Macron's "extremely unfair" ongoing pension reform.

Violaine Lucas, president of the association "Choosing the cause of women", which was co-founded by Gisèle Halimi in 1971, also boycotted the tribute as she denounced Macron's "political instrumentalisation" of the figure.

Meanwhile, Halimi's eldest son Jean-Yves Halimi decided to attend the tribute and pays a personal homage to his mother and women in North Africa.

"Here, we celebrated feminist struggles that on the other side of the Mediterranean, we silenced,[...] For you, it's was one and the same commitment nourished by your inextinguishable thirst for justice," declared Jean-Yves Halimi before evoking the Algerian war and episodes of their family life directly linked to French colonial history.

In May 2021, a source from the Élysée admitted to France Inter, that the figure of Gisèle Halimi was divisive, in particular among the associations of pied-noirs and Harkis and that Paris "is listening to all parties."

In January 2021, historian Benjamin Stora recommended in his report on the reconciliation of Franco-Algerian memories to ‘pantheonise’ the feminist lawyer. 

'Girls and wives of Harkis' were quick to voice their opposition, saying "Gisèle Halimi, who on several other occasions displayed her contempt for Harkis, is not a woman of reconciliation." Harkis were the Algerians who enlisted to fight on the side of France. Considered traitors in Algeria, more than 91,000 Harkis found refuge in France after independence.

They are today only six women, among 75 men, rest within the Pantheon, the temple where the Republic honours its heroes and intellectuals who represent the Republic values.

The Elysée says that the decision to pantheonise Gisèle Halimi is still "in progress".