Lhe citizens’ convention on the end of life will have to deliver, in March, an opinion on the legalization of assisted suicide or euthanasia, prior to a possible law on the subject. At the same time, a think tank led by Academician Erik Orsenna was tasked with « design a lexicon of end-of-life wordsexplains Béatrice Jérôme in The world, on December 23, 2022.
It is thus a question of knowing what we are talking about. “The word ‘euthanasia’ is not a pretty word, complained, on November 17 on France 2, Olivier Véran, spokesperson for the government. It is a word that is connoted in the French language. » According to the Greek etymology (eu, « good » et thanatos, « mort “), the term nevertheless means the “good death”. Over time, we preferred periphrases: “beautiful death” “sweet death”, “death of grace” or “death with dignity”.
In The world, the use of the word started on a false track, a dubious meaning that will pursue and discredit him. On October 16, 1945, he appears in an unsigned paragraph reporting on the trial of Nazi doctors and nurses from the Hadamar asylum in Germany, labeled as “euthanasia providers”. “In this establishment, tens of thousands of Germans, insane or incurable, had been exterminated”, writes the newspaper.
“It is perhaps when the art of the doctor has become impotent that the problems which arise in his conscience are most agonizing. » Flavien Bonnet-Roy
Same confusion on December 6, 1946, in a short article on the Nuremberg trial, which judged “twenty-three doctors who performed vivisection and euthanasia on concentration camp internees”. This semantic misuse, this amalgamation with eugenics and medical assassination will subsequently disturb the political and societal debate.
In his medical Time.news of December 28, 1946, Flavien Bonnet-Roy nevertheless tries to put the word back on the right track. In this immediate post-war period, 1,500 international doctors ask, in a motion tabled at the UN, the right to what they prefer to name “legal homicide for charity”. “Thus the question of euthanasia, of gentle, induced death, is once again on the agenda, while waiting for the term itself, which has hitherto been banned from it, to find its right de cité in the dictionary of the French Academy”, writes Flavien Bonnet-Roy, himself a doctor in the city.
“It is by a singular misuse of language that it has been claimed to include in euthanasia I do not know what right of the community to exclude from its midst the abnormal, the insane, the degenerate, the non-values of all kinds », continues the doctor. He is nonetheless reluctant: “We don’t think euthanasia can become part of our morals. » It finds : “The doctor’s duty, in the midst of a humanity doomed to all miseries, is a difficult duty, and it is perhaps when his art has become impotent that the problems which arise in his conscience are most agonizing. »
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