The Holocaust cast a dark shadow over Caroline Fournet's French childhood and shaped her future career.
The academic with a growing reputation in the field of international law and human rights was 10 in 1987, when the trial began of the local Gestapo leader Klaus Barbie -- dubbed the Butcher of Lyon for his role in the torture of high-ranking members of the French Resistance. He was responsible for the deportation of 842 Jews, including 44 children from an orphanage who were dispatched to Auschwitz.
Lyon is Fournet's home city. She's the daughter of liberal, non-Jewish parents. Her father is an architect and "there were no taboo subjects when it came to discussions around our dinner table."
Many French families had rather more to hide.
"France has still to deal with its past, and the appalling behavior of the Vichy government," she said in her office in the school of law at Exeter University, England. "It has taken two or three generations for the issue to be discussed more freely. But there's a growing interest in the second world war among young people in particular. Survivors are going into schools and being very well received."
Fournet attended an international school from the age of three.
"My parents obviously couldn't wait to get rid of me," she said, giving a flash of the smile that offsets the earnestness with which she discusses her specialist subjects: rights abuse, torture and genocide.
HOT TOPIC
With the Barbie trial, an international issue landed on her school's doorstep. The horrible revelations being aired in a nearby courtroom became a hot topic in the classroom.
"I remember feeling angry and frustrated as I struggled to understand the enormity of what had happened in the city where I was growing up," she said.
Three years later, an inspirational history teacher helped her to put her thoughts into perspective.
"He was passionate on the subject of Barbie, and he transmitted some of that passion to me," she said. "We used to watch extracts from the trial on film."
"He also introduced us to a book by Serge Klarsfeld, the Nazi hunter who tracked Barbie down to his home in Bolivia. I remember seeing pictures of those Jewish children, and feeling that I could really relate to them. It hit me quite forcibly that our democratic societies are extremely fragile," she said.
That conviction grew in strength as the horrors of the Balkan wars began to unfold in 1993, and television screens were filled with scenes that hadn't been witnessed in Europe since 1945.
"I just knew that I wanted to go into human-rights law," she says. "And the more I studied, the more I realized that academia would be the only career where I could have complete freedom of thought and expression."
At 30, she has two books under her belt, one on international crimes and another on society's failure to respond adequately to mass atrocities. It's a theme she returns to in her third book, to be published next year, dealing with what she calls "the French paradox."
When it comes to genocide, she said, "legal theory in France is extremely progressive, but in practice it's non-existent."
The Barbie trial was a good illustration of that, she says.
"He was found guilty of crimes against humanity because of his activities as a torturer, but genocide was not among the charges. His complicity in an attempt to erase the Jews from the face of the earth should have been brought up in court as genocide, because that's exactly what it was," she says.
She accepts, however, that justice was done, eventually. Barbie was sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison. But he was in his 80s by the time he was brought before the court, and he lived only four years after he was jailed.
"He evaded justice for decades because of his usefulness to United States counter-intelligence, insofar as he could provide information about communists," she says. "International politics don't go well with human rights."
History would repeat itself nearly 20 years later with the trial of late Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, another monstrous figure who was found guilty of crimes against humanity but not genocide.
"It was another great opportunity missed," Fournet argues. "The death sentence was imposed before all the charges were dealt with. I suppose the execution was inevitable, once he was handed over to an Iraqi tribunal."
"Personally, I would have preferred him to have been given life imprisonment, but it became a matter of Iraqi sovereignty and it's difficult to take issue with that. What's for sure is that the filming of his execution and the transmission of those pictures around the world was disgusting," she says.
She paused and shuddered, pulling her cardigan more tightly around herself.
"Revolting and disgusting. Nobody deserves to be treated like that. He was a barbaric dictator but, if you have a trial to promote human rights, I don't see how we can violate them in the process," she says.
Fournet gave voice to her feelings about the treatment afforded to Saddam and Barbie, as well as former Yugoslavian president Slobodan Milosevic and Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet, when Exeter hosted a conference in October on the subject of Justice for All.
She was the only academic speaker among some distinguished legal practitioners, including Judge Howard Morrison, Queen's Council, who had been defense counsel at the international criminal tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.
"We academics focus a lot on theory, so it was good to have some practical viewpoints," she says. "I learned a lot that day, and we're hoping to repeat the conference in London."
NO FEARS
The complexity of legal language holds no fears for her, even when it is in English rather than French. She emerged from her international school completely bilingual. But why, after gaining qualifications at the University Jean Moulin and the Institut des Hautes Etudes Europeennes, did she seek a career in Britain?
"If you are young, it's difficult to get a good job, where you're taken seriously, in France," she said.
"We got rid of our aristocracy in 1789, but it has re-emerged in a different form. It's still a very privilege-ridden society. In UK universities, on the other hand, there's an attitude that if you're good enough, you're old enough. I may be wrong, but that's been my experience," she said.
She did a doctorate in Leicester, in the English midlands, which gave her a chance to acclimatize to British ways and get used to the food. Was that a shock to the system of one brought up in the gastronomic capital of France?
"After the horror stories about British cuisine that circulate at home, it has been quite a pleasant surprise," she said. "The food's okay. Exeter is close to the sea, which I like. Plenty of shellfish around."
"It's not as warm as Corsica," she said, glancing wistfully at one of the postcards on her notice board, "but it is close to the `English Riviera.'"
And with that comes another dazzling smile, sunshine on a wintry day.
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