He called his memoir The Shining Bastard and likened himself to the great men of fiction “who stand alone against the establishment.” The Washington Post once described him as “a man who aspires to Scoundreldom.”

Jacques Verges, the French lawyer and enfant terrible known for his defence of the world’s most despised criminals, including the infamous Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie and Venezuelan-born terrorist Ilich Ramirez Sanchez (better known as Carlos the Jackal), died Thursday in Paris. He was reported to be 88.

Verges died of a heart attack in the house where 18th-century philosopher Voltaire once lived, according to his publisher Pierre-Guillaume de Roux.

Verges was born in Thailand to a Vietnamese mother and a Frenchman serving in the colonial diplomatic corps. Verges claimed the mixed marriage cost his father his job, and he said the sting of prejudice he experienced in childhood motivated his legal work on behalf of outcasts.

In a career spanning more than five decades, Verges was one of the most enigmatic and provocative legal personalities in the world. He cultivated an air of mystery by vanishing for most of the 1970s, an absence that to this day has never been explained, despite the best efforts of investigative journalists.

To many, he was also deeply infuriating, a headline-chaser. Defending Barbie, dubbed the “Butcher of Lyons” for his role in the deaths of thousands of Jews and Resistance fighters during the Second World War, Verges said he found Barbie “a respectable man … unjustly condemned.”

In Carlos the Jackal — the Marxist-inspired radical who orchestrated bombings and kidnappings in the 1970s and 1980s — Verges saw “a man of taste … who feels at home in a dinner jacket.”

“I would have defended Hitler,” he told the German magazine Der Spiegel in 2008. “Defending doesn’t mean excusing. A lawyer doesn’t judge, doesn’t condemn, doesn’t acquit. He tries to understand.”

Verges first came to international attention in the late 1950s as a lawyer for Algerians accused of terrorism in their quest for independence from France. Later clients included militants acting on behalf of Palestinian causes.

“I’m a bit like Don Juan,” Verges once said. “I love revolutions like he loved women. I like to go from one to the other, and I like them when they are young. When they get older, I lose interest.”

When not defending revolutionaries, he was an advocate of choice for the reviled. Verges said he provided legal counsel to Khieu Samphan of Cambodia’s reviled Khmer Rouge, accused Serbian war criminal Slobodan Milosevic and former Iraqi foreign minister Tariq Aziz.

In melodramatic rants against capitalism, racism and the hypocrisy of Western society, Verges often turned the courtroom into a stage for political grandstanding. His signature strategy was to minimize his client’s alleged crimes by redirecting attention to historical acts of violence. In the Algerian cases, he pointed to France’s use of torture in Algeria.

In Barbie’s trial in France in 1987, Verges dredged up the collaborationist history of Vichy France in World War II. He likened French colonial policy in Southeast Asia to Hitler’s persecution of Jews.

“Yellow people didn’t have to wear the yellow star,” he said, referring to the identifying symbol forced on Jews during Nazi rule. “It was written on their face.”

Another of his techniques was to humanize defendants who seemed indefensible. To Barbie, he said, “You’re not innocent, but neither are you a monster. You’re an officer … of an occupying army in a country that resists. You’re no better and no worse than a French officer in Algeria, an American officer in Vietnam, a Russian officer in Kabul.”

For all his swagger, Verges was seldom vindicated. Barbie, for instance, was sentenced to life for crimes against humanity and died in prison in 1991.

“There is an aspect of professional challenge,” he once told The Post of his client roster. “If I were a doctor I would rather have done the first open-heart surgery than have treated 1,000 colds.”

Jacques Verges was born in Thailand on April 20, 1924, or March 5, 1925 — he said he was not sure of the date. (News agencies said he was 88 when he died.)

During World War II, Verges joined Charles de Gaulle’s Free French Forces and served as an artilleryman in North Africa, Italy and France.

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He later studied law in Paris and during the late 1950s and early 1960s he emerged as a pitbull of the French legal system, at times insulting judges and embracing censure.

Later in the ‘60s, Verges became a defence lawyer for Palestinians accused of hijacking and other forms of terrorism. Then, in early 1970, he vanished. He resurfaced in 1978 and returned to the law.

“A man is never all black or all white,” he once told an interviewer. “In the heart of the worst criminal there is always a secret garden. And in the heart of the most honest man, a nest of the most terrible reptiles.”

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