Thierry Lévy
Thierry Lévy (13 January 1945 – 30 January 2017) was a high-profile French criminal defence lawyer who spent his career in a state of permanent opposition to the French legal establishment. Admitted to the Paris bar in 1969, he went on to appear in a succession of well publicised criminal trials during the ensuing three and a half decades. His father had been a journalist and press proprietor who was not infrequently supportive of nationalist and other right-wing movements. Thierry Lévy's own assessments of the French criminal justice system, which he shared frequently through the print media and, especially during his later years, in television debates, placed him firmly at the liberal-left end of the political spectrum, however. He was a prominent and eloquent backer of the campaign that led to the abolition of the death penalty by Justice Minister Robert Badinter under President Mitterrand in 1981. Biography Provenance and early years Thierry Lévy was born into a prosperous middle class Jewish family, some five months after the Liberation of Paris. He and his two elder siblings grew up, as one commentator puts it, living in a beautiful house in the [affluent] Bois de Boulogne [quarter of Paris]. Paul Lévy, his father, had been 68 when he was born, and the son, in turn, was just 14 when his father died. Paul Lévy had built his career as a nationalist anti-German and at times polemical journalist during the build up to the First World War, writing for publications such as L'Aurore, Le Journal and L'Intransigeant. He then, in 1918, founded , a weekly journal which over the next twenty years took a similarly populist line, pursuing a sustained campaign of hostility again Aristide Briand, whom Aux écoutes deplored and despised on account of his "pacifism". Thierry Lévy's mother, born Rose Salomon Nathan (1906-1997), came from eastern France, was a qualified lawyer who later built a career as a respected economist-statistician. Five years before Thierry Lévy's birth France was occupied by German forces. In response to the government antisemitic legislation that followed, Paul Lévy handed over the keys to the office of his political weekly to its former editor-in-chief, Maurice Blanchot, whose journalistic record was similarly nationalistic and anti-German. But Blanchot was not Jewish; and nor was he antisemitic. It was Blanchot who warned his proprietor of the latter's imminent arrest, as a result of which Lévy and his wife escaped to the "forbidden zone" in the south, and successfully hid themselves. Thierry Lévy was accordingly born not in the Paris region but in Nice. After returning to Paris, Rose Lévy, who was herself a Jewish convert to Catholicism lost little time in arranging for the couple's three children to be received into the Catholic church. The Bishop of Paris performed the baptisms in person. Although admirers thought him a great humanist, there is no reason to think that Thierry Lévy would ever have considered himself a particularly godly man. He was always very conscious of his Jewish provenance however, and