‘Je vous demande le droit de mourir’ by Vincent Humbert

In the year 2000, Vincent Humbert, a young firefighter, was involved in a road traffic collision which left him paraplegic, blind and mute. Despite this, he remained cognitively sharp and eventually decided that he did not want to go on living. With his decision made, he wrote to Jacques Chirac, the French President at the time, requesting the right to end his life. Although the President was sympathetic, he was not in a position to make the necessary legislative changes and Vincent’s request was essentially refused. Nonetheless, with the help of his mother and his doctor, Vincent Humbert died on 26 September 2003. This book is his story, written with the help of journalist Frédéric Veille, offering profound insights on the emotional, physical, mental and existential suffering endured by Humbert – and others in similar situations – when they cannot access the assisted death they so desire.

The title of the work gives the impression that this text is an extension of the letter that Humbert sent to President Jacques Chirac, requesting the right to end his life; however, the text is much more than an extended letter. It combines forms of writing that are clearly activist with a more intimate portrait of Humbert, of his relationships and of his life following the car accident that left him paralysed. The text is also somewhat of a collage: Humbert’s first-person voice sits alongside song lyrics, a variety of reproduced letters (including Humbert’s letter to Jacques Chirac and the President’s reply), and the text of a speech in favour of assisted dying, delivered by Anne Duclaux at the Concours des plaidoiries des lycéens and forwarded to Humbert. As the concluding chapter insists, the text is to be understood as Humbert’s ‘livre-testament’ (book-will). This phrase introduces an important legal dimension, which causes the reader to consider the evidentiary weight to the text they are holding. The multiple layers of Humbert’s narrative therefore combine to construct a text that is both a powerfully personal and emotive plea for the ‘right to die’ and an evidentiary tome that might, Humbert seems to suggest, form the basis of future legal change (which, indeed, it did).

Vincent Humbert’s story was widely publicised in the French media at the time and it is often considered one of the most influential cases in the history of the assisted dying debate in France. Indeed, in the more recent debate surrounding the case of Vincent Lambert, Vincent Humbert’s story came to the fore again, with ‘les deux Vincent’ (the two Vincents) becoming a symbol of the pro-assisted dying movement in France. Following his death, Vincent’s mother, Marie Humbert, continued to lobby for the introduction of assisted dying legislation. While she did not see the introduction of this legislation in her lifetime (she passed away in 2018), Marie Humbert was extremely influential in shaping public discourse. Vincent Humbert’s story has regularly been evoked in parliamentary debates surrounding end of life care and assisted dying, to the extent that he has almost become a cultural reference point for discussions of assisted dying in France.