Halimi died peacefully a day after her 93rd birthday, one of her three sons, Emmanuel Faux, told AFP. "She fought to reach 93," he added.
Born on 27 July 1927 to a Jewish family in Tunisia, Halimi was described by her father as a rebel from the start. She went on a hunger strike at the age of ten to champion her right to read.
Six years later, she refused an arranged marriage, obtaining the right instead to move to France to pursue her education.
Halimi returned to Tunis in 1949 and embarked upon a legal career. She made a name for herself by defending activists from the Algerian nationalist movement, the National Liberation Front (FLN).
Landmark abortion case
But she earned national fame as a lawyer, notably in a 1972 trial where she defended a minor who was on trial for having an abortion after being raped.
She ensured not only that the young woman, Marie-Claire Chevalier, was acquitted but helped swing public opinion behind the realisation that such trials had no place in modern day France.
The Chevalier case helped spur the momentum that helped Halimi and other activists, including the iconic women's rights lawmaker Simone Veil, to win the decriminalisation of abortion in 1975.
Fighting injustice
Halimi later served in the French parliament from 1981 to 1984.
A mother of three boys, including Serge Halimi, editorial director of the French monthly, Le Monde diplomatique, Halimi said she would have liked to have had a daughter to "test" her feminist commitment.
"I would have liked to know if, by raising her, I would be conforming exactly to what I had claimed, both for myself and for all women," she told Le Monde in 2011.
"Injustice is physically intolerable to me," she said on another occasion. "All my life can be summed up with that."
