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Paris dusts off statues of trailblazing women from 2024 Olympics

Paris on Friday installed the first of 10 statues of pioneering French women displayed during the 2024 Olympics in a northern district of the capital.

The 10 statues featured as part of the French capital’s boundary-breaking opening ceremony for the Summer Games in July last year.

They include Simone Veil, who spearheaded the legalisation of abortion in France, and the feminist writer Simone de Beauvoir.

The first of them, a golden representation of the campaigning lawyer Gisele Halimi, was set up in the capital’s northern La Chapelle district on Friday.

Halimi, a Tunisian-born French lawyer who died five years ago aged 93, earned national fame for her role in a 1972 trial defending a minor who had an abortion after a rape. 

She ensured not only that the young woman, Marie-Claire Chevalier, was acquitted but also helped swing public opinion on the issue of reproductive rights.

She was one of the most prominent of 343 women who in 1971 signed an open letter saying that they had had abortions.

Michele Zaoui, an architect working for the city of Paris, said the plan was to keep the statues in the neighbourhood for a least a few more years until the opening of the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles.

During artistic director Thomas Jolly’s Olympics opening ceremony, the statues surged up from the waters of the Seine.

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