page_title: Simone Veil
section_title: Death
hierarchical_section_title: Simone Veil / Death
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: La rue Soufflot et le Panthéon avant le transfert des cendres de Simone et Antoine Veil
context_page_description: Simone Annie Liline Veil Grand-croix DBE was a French lawyer and politician who served as Minister of Health under Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, President of the European Parliament and member of the Constitutional Council of France.
  A survivor of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp where she lost part of her family during the Holocaust; she served as the first president of the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah, from 2000 to 2007, and subsequently as honorary president. She was elected to the Académie française in November 2008. She was best known for ministerially pushing forward the law legalizing abortion in France on 17 January 1975. She and her husband were buried in the Panthéon on 1 July 2018. Only the fifth woman in history to be accorded this burial honor, her eulogy was given, during the reinterment ceremony, by President Emmanuel Macron.
context_section_description: Veil died at home on 30 June 2017, two weeks before her 90th birthday.
  Her son Jean said at her public ceremony on 5 July, "I forgive you for having poured water over my head", in reference to an event where she had emptied a carafe of water over his head in disgust at what she considered to be his misogynist remarks.
  On 5 July 2017, Veil was honoured with a national ceremony and military honours in les Invalides courtyard, after which she was interred next to her husband, who died in 2013, at Montparnasse Cemetery. The ceremony at les Invalides was attended by President Macron, Holocaust survivors, politicians and dignitaries. In his speech during the ceremony, Macron announced the decision to rebury Veil and her husband in the Panthéon, which was done on 1 July 2018.
caption: Panthéon and rue Soufflot prepared for the Panthéon ceremony.
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