Simone Veil in the Panthéon: Her Tomb and Her Story

Nice lay in the Italian occupation zone, and for a time the Jacob family escaped the round-ups, living apart under false identities. In March 1944 the Gestapo arrested Simone, then the rest of the family. On 7 April she was taken to Drancy with her mother and her sister Madeleine, and on 13 April they were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in convoy 71.

Her father and brother were sent east in convoy 73 and never seen again. Her other sister, Denise, active in the Resistance, was deported to Ravensbrück. By her own account, Simone escaped the gas chamber by lying about her age and was registered for labour.

In January 1945 she was marched with her mother and Madeleine to Bergen-Belsen, where her mother died of typhus. The two sisters were still alive when the camp was liberated on 15 April 1945.

Back in France she studied law and political science, married Antoine Veil in 1946 and, in 1954, passed the examination to become a magistrate. At the prison administration she worked to improve conditions for women in prison, and in 1970 she became secretary general of the Superior Council of the Judiciary.

In May 1974 she was appointed Minister of Health. A first law widening access to contraception was adopted that December, and on 17 January 1975 the law legalising abortion under set conditions followed.

The debate in parliament was fierce, and she and her family were personally attacked by opponents of the reform. The law still carries her name, and it became the core of her public legacy, the achievement she was honoured for again and again.

In 1979 the first European Parliament elected by direct vote chose her as its president, the first woman in the post, which she held until 1982. She sat as a member until 1993, returned to government that year, then served on the Constitutional Council from 1998 to 2007.

In 2008 she was elected to the Académie française, taking the thirteenth seat, once held by Jean Racine. She died at home in Paris on 30 June 2017, aged 89.

After a national ceremony with military honours at Les Invalides on 5 July, she was buried beside Antoine at Montparnasse Cemetery. In his speech Macron announced her entry into the Panthéon, and the couple were transferred there on 1 July 2018.