Thierry Lévy (; 13 January 1945 – 30 January 2017) was a high-profile French criminal defence lawyer who spent his career in a state of permanent opposition to the French legal establishment. Admitted to the Paris bar in 1969, he went on to appear in a succession of well publicised criminal trials during the ensuing three and a half decades. His father had been a journalist and press proprietor who was not infrequently supportive of nationalist and other right-wing movements. Thierry Lévy's own assessments of the French criminal justice system, which he shared frequently through the print media and, especially during his later years, in television debates, placed him firmly at the liberal-left end of the political spectrum, however. He was a prominent and eloquent backer of the campaign that led to the abolition of the death penalty by Justice Minister Robert Badinter under President Mitterrand in 1981.
Biography Provenance and early years Thierry Lévy was born into a prosperous middle class Jewish family, some five months after the Liberation of Paris. He and his two elder siblings grew up, as one commentator puts it, living in a beautiful house in the [affluent] Bois de Boulogne [quarter of Paris]. Paul Lévy, his father, had been 68 when he was born, and the son, in turn, was just 14 when his father died. Paul Lévy had built his career as a nationalist anti-German and at times polemical journalist during the build up to the First World War, writing for publications such as L'Aurore, Le Journal and L'Intransigeant. He then, in 1918, founded , a weekly journal which over the next twenty years took a similarly populist line, pursuing a sustained campaign of hostility again Aristide Briand, whom Aux écoutes deplored and despised on account of his "pacifism". Thierry Lévy's mother, born Rose Salomon Nathan (1906-1997), came from eastern France, was a qualified lawyer who later built a career as a respected economist-statistician. Five years before Thierry Lévy's birth France was occupied by German forces. In response to the government antisemitic legislation that followed, Paul Lévy handed over the keys to the office of his political weekly to its former editor-in-chief, Maurice Blanchot, whose journalistic record was similarly nationalistic and anti-German. But Blanchot was not Jewish; and nor was he antisemitic. It was Blanchot who warned his proprietor of the latter's imminent arrest, as a result of which Lévy and his wife escaped to the "forbidden zone" in the south, and successfully hid themselves. Thierry Lévy was accordingly born not in the Paris region but in Nice.
After returning to Paris, Rose Lévy, who was herself a Jewish convert to Catholicism lost little time in arranging for the couple's three children to be received into the Catholic church. The Bishop of Paris performed the baptisms in person. Although admirers thought him a great humanist, there is no reason to think that Thierry Lévy would ever have considered himself a particularly godly man. He was always very conscious of his Jewish provenance however, and in particular sensitive to the ways in which he thought people reacted to him on account of it.
When his father died Thierry Lévy was a pupil at the prestigious Lycée Janson-de-Sailly (secondary school) where he earned his Baccalauréat. Over the next few years he secured his first degree from the Faculty of Law at the Institut d'études politiques de Paris (Sciences Po) in 1967, a University Law qualification (licencié en droit) and a post-graduate degree in Philosophy.
Aux écoutes Seven years after his father's death Thierry Lévy took over the reins of in 1966. The family journal was back in family hands. However, the shrill nationalism that had drawn in readers in the 1930s no longer had so much traction in the 1960s. had been losing readers for years. Lévy's solution was to transform the publication from its traditional populism into a mouthpiece for ideas coming from intellectual left. However, the market in political opinion magazines was finite, and the readers whom he now hoped to attract already had access to political journals which presumably they mostly knew and trusted. For , circulation continued to fall away: publication came to an end in 1969. The previous year the owners had been ordered by a Paris court to pay damages of 80,000 francs "plus interest" in respect of a libel claim brought by or on behalf of Jacques Foccart, a government minister. The offending lines in the magazine article had been penned by Lévy himself, and the judgement was given under Article 226 of the French penal code. It was reported that Lévy had been unaware of the existence of Article 226, which was a recent addition to the code. It is not entirely clear from press reports of the case whether the size of the award against the publication was to be seen as a reflection of the court's view of the seriousness of the libel against the government minister, or an expression of displeasure that the article had been seen to "libel", the French justice system by undermining its authority and raising doubts about its independence from the politicians.
Defence lawyer Claude Buffet His first well-publicised case, following his admission to the bar, came in June 1972 when he found himself appearing with Rémy Crauste to defend Claude Buffet and Roger Bontems who had been charged with murdering a prison guard and a prison nurse after taking them hostage at Clairvaux Prison. Lévy defended Buffet and Crauste defended Bontems. The defence case for Buffet was based, in large part, on the submission that killing the hostages had been the idea of his fellow inmate and co-accused. Buffet himself seems to have been indifferent to his fate, however: both cases were lost. Claude Buffet and Rémy Crauste were executed on the guillotine at La Santé Prison in Paris on 28 November 1972. The two-man prison revolt was presented by Lévy as a predictable human reaction to the conditions under which the accused men had been detained by the French prison system. Continuing media coverage of the verdict and subsequent execution provided a platform that Lévy used to repeat his demands for improvements in French prison conditions.
The Halfen brothers and Jean-Louis Bruguière Opposed to the deprivation of liberty, Thierry Lévy on at least one occasion declared himself to be the enemy of all power, all laws and all judges. Quite early on, he broke with the justice establishment, refusing to take on any cases in which he might be called upon to demand a prison sentence. He defended the Halfen Brothers, two alleged members of the Action directe (armed terrorist group) after they had been arrested on suspicion of involvement in a serious shooting incident in 1983. He secured an acquittal for Claude Halfen, but Nicolas Halfen was found guilty and sentenced to a ten-year jail term. The case resurfaced in 2009 when Lévy represented Claude Halfen in a defamation action brought against Jean-Louis Bruguière, the investigating magistrate who had earlier been involved in the original case, and the journalist Jean-Marie Pontaut. The case concerned a book of interviews, (loosely, 'Things I could not say [at the time]'), which included the assertion that on 31 May 1983 Claude Halfen had been a member of the Action directe commando team which had killed two policemen and seriously injured a third, as part of what the media were calling by now the "Trudaine Avenue massacre", even though he had not himself fired a shot. This was precisely the charge on which Claude Halfen had been acquitted at his trial on 13 June 1987. The former investigating magistrate Jean-Louis Bruguière was acquitted on the defamation charge by a court of first instance in 2011, but Lévy lodged an appeal on behalf of his client. Later that year the appeal was rejected. Thierry Lévy persisted, however, and according to at least one source the Court of Cassation set aside the acquittal and sent the appeal on the Halfen defamation case for a retrial, to be held before the Court of Appeal at Rennes. The Rennes court again acquitted the defendants. However, in 2015 the Court of Cassation again became involved and set aside the acquittal, citing various statutory violations in the earlier decision.
Roger Knobelspiess In 1986 Lévy secured the release of Roger Knobelspiess, already a reformed criminal turned well-known author on account of earlier involvement with the French justice and prisons systems Knobelspiess had received a presidential pardon on account of earlier matters in 1981, and then in 1983 been convicted and imprisoned in connection with an armed robbery which had had always insisted he did not commit. The robbery in question had degenerated into a shoot-out between passengers in a car, and police in pursuit. Knobelspiess, who was driving the car, stated consistently that he never had any homicidal intent, and had been convicted in 1983 purely in account of a long-standing vendetta on the part of certain police officers.
Christian Didier Another of Lévy's more widely publicised cases involved Christian Didier, the self-proclaimed killer of René Bousquet. Bousquet was a friend of President Mitterrand: he had served as a senior police official under the Pétain puppet government in the 1940s. Given the agreed facts of his shooting by Didier, a conventional argument for the defence to advance would have involved casting doubt on Didier's mental state. There could be no certainty that Didier would agree to co-operate with such a defence. In the event, however, his own conduct during the trial in 1995 would surely have been enough to persuade the court of, at the very least, his mental instability. Be that as it might, Thierry Lévy and his junior Arnaud Montebourg instead put forward the argument that the killing of René Bousquet by Christian Didier represented a perfectly reasonable response to the failings of the French justice system, given that Bousquet had still been at liberty when he died, despite persisting rumours and allegations of a deeply discreditable wartime record. After the sentence was passed Lévy candidly volunteered that he and Montebourg perhaps had not been the best team to defend their client. Didier was sentenced to ten years of criminal detention.
Bernard Lewis Lévy can be said ultimately to have won three of the four cases in which he represented the sometimes combative orientalist historian Bernard Lewis. In respect of the fourth case, which was lost against the Paris-based International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism (), Lewis refused advice that he should appeal the verdict, asserting by way of explanation that he had no confidence in the French justice system.Bernard Lewis, Notes on a Century. Reflections of a Middle East Historian, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2012, pp. 288-292
Eva Joly In 2003 he represented Eva Joly, who as an investigating magistrate with a reputation for juridical anti-corruption activism had acquired a certain number of enemies in high places, faced a determined attempt by an alliance of senior lawyers to block the sale and distribution of her book (loosely, 'Is this the kind of world we want to live in?'). The very name of the book, in combination with the identity of its author, set off a rattling of skeletons in cupboards, notably among those involved in aspects of the so-called Elf Petroleum scandal and its lengthy investigation. The book was nevertheless published, albeit following a deferral of approximately twelve months.
The Clairvaux break-out