French police officers stand next to the grave of former French justice minister Robert Badinter, which had been vandalized, at the Bagneux cemetery in Bagneux, near Paris, on October 9, 2025. (Thomas SAMSON / AFP)
A French court sentences a student to a suspended term of one year in jail over desecrating the tomb of Robert Badinter, a former French justice minister and Holocaust survivor who ended the death penalty in France in 1981.
The court sentences the engineering student from a prestigious graduate school for spraying graffiti on Badinter’s tomb in October.
The incident occurred just hours before Badinter, whose legacy also included decriminalizing homosexuality, was to symbolically enter the country’s Pantheon mausoleum of outstanding historical figures.
“Eternal is their gratitude, the murderers, the paedophiles, the rapists,” read the blue graffiti on his tombstone, according to local authorities.
President Emmanuel Macron reacted immediately, writing on X: “Shame on those who wanted to sully his memory.”
Former French justice minister Robert Badinter is seen in Paris, Saturday, October 9, 2021. (Ian Langsdon /Pool Photo via AP, File)
The defendant told a court in the Paris suburb of Nanterre that he was a “royalist” who had been upset by someone taking a sledgehammer to the tombstone of former far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, a Holocaust denier, in January.
Badinter, born in 1928, survived the Holocaust under a false name in Vichy France. His father was murdered by the Nazis in the Sobibor death camp. He served as France’s justice minister from 1981 to 1986 and died in 2024.
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