Michèle Barzach

Michèle Barzach was born on 11 July 1943 in Casablanca, Morocco, into a North African Jewish family. She completed her secondary education in Casablanca and then studied medicine at the faculty of medicine in Paris. From 1970 to 1986 she worked in Paris as a gynaecologist and psychoanalyst. In 1974 she co-wrote, with G. C. Rapaille, the book Je t'aime, je ne t'aime pas, on creativity and collective poetry.

Barzach was an RPR activist for around ten years and became the party's national delegate for social affairs, with Jacques Toubon among those who promoted her. When Jacques Chirac became prime minister under President François Mitterrand in March 1986, she was appointed minister of health and the family, working under the minister of social affairs Philippe Séguin. She held the post from 20 March 1986 to 10 May 1988.

She was the first French minister to build a public policy against AIDS. Against the views of many in her own camp, she had a law passed lifting the ban on condom advertising and launched information campaigns, including on television. On 13 May 1987 she signed a decree allowing the free sale of syringes in pharmacies, which helped reduce HIV and hepatitis C infection among drug users and opened the way to France's harm reduction policy, later written into law in 2004. In 1988 she also signed a circular beginning the concentration of maternity units for reasons of safety.

In 1988 she was elected to the National Assembly for Paris and became a deputy mayor of Paris under Chirac. She sat briefly in the European Parliament in 1989. As one of the RPR "renovators" associated with Michel Noir and François Léotard, she clashed with the party leadership, accused Charles Pasqua of embodying a drift to the right, and resigned from the RPR in 1990. She stood unsuccessfully in the 1992 regional elections in Orléans. In 1996 she signed, with Simone Veil and others, a manifesto for gender parity in politics, and then withdrew from politics.

Later she chaired the association Friends of the Global Fund Europe until 2013 and remained on its board, and from 5 June 2012 to 23 June 2015 she was president of UNICEF France. She published Le Paravent des égoïsmes (1989) and Vérités et tabous (1994).

Barzach had a daughter, Tatiana Renard-Barzach, who announced her death. She was made an officer of the Legion of Honour on 14 July 2008. In 2020, after Francesca Gee told The New York Times that the writer Gabriel Matzneff had taken her as a minor to Barzach's gynaecology practice to be prescribed the pill, Barzach was heard by police investigators in the inquiry concerning Matzneff.

Michèle Barzach died in Paris late on the morning of Monday 26 October 2026, aged 83. Her daughter, Tatiana Renard-Barzach, told Agence France-Presse that she died following a stroke. The news was carried the same day by franceinfo, RTL, France 24, La Croix and Le Parisien, which recalled her role as the minister who began France's public response to AIDS. Funeral arrangements had not been announced at the time of reporting.

Barzach is remembered as a pioneer of the fight against AIDS in France. Her decision to legalise condom advertising and her 1987 decree on the free sale of syringes are widely cited as the starting point of French prevention and harm reduction policy, recalled by Sidaction among others. She also stood for a modernising, socially liberal current on the French right and, with Simone Veil, for parity between women and men in political life.