“Despite our pain, we understood Badinter’s fight”: his cousin had been killed by the last death row inmate in France

René Barra: “our family was opposed to the death penalty”.

His cousin, a peacekeeper, was killed in 1979 in Paris by a man defended by Robert Badinter. Despite their pain, the entire family was opposed to capital punishment. 

"Although having lost a member of our family, we understood Badinter's fight against the death penalty.René Barra lives today in Le Cailar (Gard) and is 76 years old. This is the age that his cousin Gérard Croux would also have been, if he had not crossed paths with Philippe Maurice in a street in Paris in December 1979. The fleeing criminal shot dead that night, on rue Monge, two peace guards, Jean-Yves Ruelle and Gérard Croux. "Gérard was like my brother, we were very close. It was I who put him in a coffin, a very painful memory says René Barra who remembers the ceremony at the Quai des Orfèvres and the mass at Our Lady. "My uncle was a police commissioner. The assassin's father was also a policeman, and I see these two men kissing again, each in their misfortune, one having a son killed, the other to have a thug son.

"We are against the death penalty"

The father of Gérard Croux, like that of René Barra, are former resistance fighters. Originally from La Roque d'Anthéron, their mother was mayor from 1945 to 1959. "She was one of the first female mayors in France, and for this family anchored on the left, in a village which experienced a massacre at the hands of the Nazis, the question of the death penalty does not arise: we are against it, and we understand Badinter's fight." &amp ;nbsp;Philippe Maurice will ultimately be the last sentenced to death in France, with the abolition of the death penalty, his sentence will be commuted to life imprisonment.

René recognizes that the conditional release of his cousin's murderer in 2000, and a certain visibility of him, who became a doctor in medieval history, was " a difficult time". 

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