Five hundred gendarmes wearing black boots and jackets cordoned off the wooded hillside where the cemetery is located 24 hours before the Pope's visit. Two police helicopters circled the site all morning, and the gendarmes prevented several hundred local residents, demonstrators and journalists from approaching.
The Pope arrived in a French army helicopter and met Prof Jerome Lejeune's family at the graveside. High shrubs had been placed around the grave, but a photographer nonetheless managed to take the forbidden photo from a nearby hillside.
Ignoring a last-minute appeal from France's ruling Socialist Party, Pope John Paul II yesterday went ahead with a visit to the grave of the controversial antiabortion campaigner.
The party said the move would be a "provocation" which "can only create bad feeling and risk encouraging in our country those who are waging a battle marked by intolerance."
Pro and anti-abortion groups interpreted the Pope's gesture as encouragement to militant protesters, who staged three demonstrations in Paris this week. Alluding to attempts to disrupt the work of abortion clinics, the Socialists' statement said the party "believes that the law in France which allows abortion should be respected".
In 1959, Prof Lejeune, a geneticist, discovered the extra chromosome that causes Down's syndrome. He founded an antiabortion association, Let Them Live.
When the French government legalised abortion in 1974, Lejeune made an impassioned speech against the measure. He called on French men and women "who have not lost your honour" to "organise yourselves . . . to bar the path of abortionists in their enterprise of death".
Pope John Paul II named Prof Lejeune president of an "Academy for the Defence of Life" shortly before the professor died at the age of 68 in 1994. The Pope then wrote a letter to the Archbishop of Paris describing Prof Lejeune as a "great Christian of the 20th century".
While the Pope prayed at Lejeune's tomb yesterday, a handful of demonstrators from the secularist Voltaire Network handed out pamphlets in his home village, calling him anti-semitic, anti-masonic and homophobe; the accusations were shored up by quotations from Lejeune.
Amid the crowd in the village, a distinguished-looking man who said he was a 58-year-old engineer told The Irish Times that he had participated in a half dozen raids on anti-abortion clinics.
"I think the Pope has come here to support people who campaign against abortion," he said. "In the early 1990s, we used to chain ourselves together in the operating rooms," he recalled.
"The newspapers called us `terrorists' because a woman wrote on the wall with lipstick, `Here they commit murder'. We used to dump containers of sterilised instruments, nothing more violent than that, but it upset people, so we adopted softer methods, like singing hymns and sit-ins."
He had listened to Prof Lejeune's frequent radio broadcasts, and these inspired him.
Prof Lejeune - and the Pope's visit to his grave - have also inspired Noella Garcia, a fashion model who this week led three anti-abortion demonstrations by 50 young people attending the World Youth Days. Yesterday, the group staged a sit-in in front of a clinic in the Boulevard Saint Germain.
"We are all around 20 years old," Ms Garcia said. "We were born after the legalisation of abortion in our countries, which is why we are survivors."
