It's here :

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/10/world/europe/ascending-heights-of-fren...

PARIS -- CHRISTIANE TAUBIRA was taken aback, she says, though not altogether surprised, at the brutality of the opposition to the same-sex marriage bill she shepherded into French law this year.

.Societies have their resistances, said Ms. Taubira, 61, a diminutive, fiery woman from French Guiana who serves as France's minister of justice. There are those who, for their own sense of security, but also by choice -- by doctrinal choice, that is to say by their choice of model -- choose to hold on to old images.

She has been the object of similar resistances herself, she says. She once wrote that she became black in Paris, though not by choice, and she has not been made to forget her otherness.

[...]

She remains sensitive to her difference, though, an outspoken woman of color in a position of considerable visibility and influence; few have come before her in France.

Her successes have not come without cost, though, and her ambition has alienated some. I don't like mediocre people -- I'm not mediocre, she once told reporters, and some family members are said to address her as Madame Taubira.

have always made my choices,” she said, and accepted their “price.

MS. TAUBIRA has positioned herself as an advocate for the marginalized or excluded, most recently turning her attention to an effort to expand the rehabilitation of young offenders.

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Ms. Taubira has now turned her focus to the prisons, promoting a politically hazardous overhaul that would institute probation in place of jail time for some misdemeanors, part of an effort to reduce recidivism rates and relieve some of the strain on France's overcrowded penitentiaries. Opponents accuse her of naïveté. She speaks of a need to educate the populace.

We're going to seek out, in the depths of people, their capacity to, firstly, reject a whole series of platitudes, of stereotypes, of clichés,” Ms. Taubira said, and to “understand that justice is not vengeance.

In what seems a break from the standard philosophy of France's welfare state, her interest is not so much in protecting the vulnerable, she said, as it is in empowering them.

The slogan of her presidential campaign, The republic that respects you,” seemed to reflect what she called a deep attachment to an almost libertarian notion of freedom over yourself an uncommon ethic in a nation of often rigid social and political hierarchies.

It has at times proved complex to reconcile her personal ambitions with a sense of pride and duty toward her roots.

"I know that I would gain by playing the Black Woman," she wrote in her memoir, published last year, but that would mean a “stunted identity. She asked, How to embrace what one is without allowing one's identity to be assigned ?

[...]