Simone Veil

Simone Veil, born Simone Jacob in Nice, was deported in 1944 with her mother and sister to Auschwitz-Birkenau and later Bergen-Belsen, where her mother died. After the war she studied law, became a magistrate in 1956 and worked to improve conditions for women prisoners and on family law. Appointed health minister by Valéry Giscard d'Estaing in 1974, she steered through laws on contraception and abortion. In 1979 she led her party's list in the first direct European elections and was chosen as the Parliament's president. She later served as a minister under Édouard Balladur and on the Constitutional Council, and was elected to the Académie française in 2008.

Veil is widely honored in France as a symbol of women's rights, Holocaust remembrance and European reconciliation; she received the Charlemagne Prize in 1981, presided over the Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah and was reburied in the Panthéon in 2018. During the 1974 abortion debate she faced exceptional hostility, including personal attacks on her and her family, and opponents of abortion continue to criticize the law that bears her name. Some critics argued that her 2005 campaign for the EU constitution compromised the impartiality of the Constitutional Council, a charge she rejected. Colleagues also described her as impatient and exacting in office.