Marie-Claire Chevalier, minor at center of landmark French abortion case, dies at 66

But a leading feminist and human rights lawyer, Gisèle Halimi, supported in the media by hundreds of French intellectuals, writers and film stars, won Ms. Chevalier’s acquittal within weeks. The case led to the decriminalization of abortion just over two years later, in January 1975. It was a historic moment for French women, almost exactly two years after the U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion in the United States in the Roe v. Wade case.

Ms. Chevalier died of cancer Jan. 23 at a hospital in Orléans, France, according to her mother, Michèle Chevalier. She was 66.

Halimi had pointed out, in court and in the media, that until 1943 a woman could, by law, have faced beheading by guillotine for having an abortion, such was the stigma around it. Before Ms. Chevalier’s mother asked the lawyer to defend her daughter, Halimi had already been part of an abortion rights group called Choisir (Choose) and a signatory to what became known as Manifesto 343, referring to that number of notable French women calling for abortion to be legalized.

The women included existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre’s longtime partner and fellow writer Simone de Beauvoir, actresses Catherine Deneuve and Jeanne Moreau and writer Françoise Sagan. Many of them, including Halimi and Deneuve, said they themselves had had illegal abortions. “I chose to make it a political trial and to appeal, over the head of the magistrate, to public opinion and the country,” Halimi told the daily Le Monde in 2019.

Simone Veil, a fellow lawyer and women’s rights advocate, took up the cause while serving as minister health in the French government of President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. He signed a law to decriminalize abortion in January 1975. It became known in France as Veil’s Law, though Halimi preferred to call it Marie-Claire’s Law.

Although Ms. Chevalier unwittingly became an icon of French feminism, her teenage experiences, including the ensuing publicity, continued to traumatize her. She went on to live a quiet life, changing her first name to Catherine to seek a degree of anonymity.

Pressured all her life by the media, publishers and would-be agents, she refused to cash in on her story. “Time passed and yet, it’s always there, buried in my memory. It takes only the tiniest thing to awaken it,” she told the French daily Libération in a rare interview in 2019.

“[After the trial] there was a hole in my head,” she said. “I no longer knew who I was. I was naughty, I hated and insulted everybody. I stole, I got drunk, I smoked.” She described her abortion as “a second rape,” giving gruesome details of how she hemorrhaged, was taken to a clinic and was told by a surgeon, “You’re lucky to be alive.”

Meanwhile, what became known as the Bobigny Trial, named after the Paris suburb in which it took place, was front-page news in France, turning Ms. Chevalier’s case into a cause celebre. Her mother, two friends and the female abortionist were given minimal, suspended 500 French franc fines, which they were never asked to pay.

In the Libération interview, Ms. Chevalier recalled the first day of her trial, facing prison essentially as a consequence of her rape while the rapist was walking free. “There was a group [of women] outside the court shouting ‘Free Marie-Claire!’ But the judge closed all the windows so that the noise couldn’t enter.”

Marie-Claire Chevalier was born to working-class parents on July 12, 1955, in the village of Meung-sur-Loire. Her father abandoned the family, and her mother, Michèle, raised three daughters. As the eldest, Marie-Claire helped bring up her sisters until the day she was raped.

Later in life, she found the residual trauma made it difficult to have relationships, and she told Libération she could not contemplate sex until she was in her 30s. But in 1988, with her partner of the time, she had a daughter, Jennifer, whom she brought up alone and who survives her along with her mother, her two sisters and three grandchildren. Her daughter and grandchildren, she said in an interview, “are my very reason for staying alive.”

She spent her latter years in the town of Loir-et-Cher, often working as a carer for the elderly and mucking out horse stables. “I’ve always been courageous. I’ve never begged,” she told Libération.

In 2019, she lent her collaboration to French writer and theater director Pauline Bureau for a play based on her life, titled “Hors de Loi” (Outlaw), for the state theater company La Comédie Française. (Comédie in France refers to theater, rather than comedy.) She said she recognized herself in the young actress Claire de La Rüe du Can, who starts the play by saying, “I am 15 years old for the rest of my life,” referring to Ms. Chevalier’s age the year before she was raped.

Miss Chevalier told Libération that Bureau, the play’s author, “gave me a priceless gift. She saved me from the mal-être [malaise] I have in my head.”