A history of French political convictions: lack of ethics or overheated politics?

 Add another one to the list. The late former President of France, Jacques Chirac, convicted of corruption of public funds in 2011. But unlike Le Pen, his sentence was suspended. 

The conviction for embezzlement of French Rassemblement National leader Marine Le Pen invites concern that the French are setting off down the same road of politicisation of the justice system and criminalisation of legitimate political policy differences as was so unsuccessfully attempted by the late and universally unlamented Biden administration against President Trump.

 Indictments of French political leaders have become almost as commonplace as those of Israeli political leaders, but in Israel the Supreme Court is self-renewing, benefits from the absence of a Constitution and in its place a “Basic Law” that requires only conscientious conformity with “sensible Jewish tradition.” Instead of coequal executive, legislative, and judicial branches as in the Constitution of the United States, Israel’s judicial branch exercises powers at least equivalent to the combination of the legislative and the executive and purports to reserve the right to be represented in every department of government including the Armed Forces, where its agents may arbitrarily determine the legality or otherwise of any initiative.

In such an absurd system, it is little wonder that despite successfully conducting a war of reprisal against the barbarous Hamas invasion of October 7, 2023, the wartime coalition government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is fighting a bare-knuckled, no-holds-barred battle for jurisdiction with the Israeli Supreme Court and has just won the first round. In such a system, where a perverse attempt at reconciliation of Talmudic concepts of justice, in which Jehovah is ostensibly believed sometimes to occupy the mind of a terrestrial Israeli ruler and provide divine direction for the chosen people, it is little wonder that former prime ministers Rabin, Sharon, and Olmert (who was imprisoned), as well as Netanyahu and several former presidents, have had serious legal problems. 

Much of it is obviously politically motivated, but the escalation of these disagreements to indictable offences is also a legitimate contest between the sacred texts of Jewish theology and the exigencies of a modern democratic state.

In France, where secular and ecclesiastical matters have been profoundly separated since, at the latest, the final and unconditional disembarkation of the Bourbons in 1830, there is no such excuse. Apart from collaborationist prime minister Laval, who was executed for treason in 1945, the last French leader who was seriously incarcerated was Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, who was imprisoned for six years prior to being elected president of the Second Republic and establishing and occupying the throne of the Second Empire. But he had attempted an armed insurrection, and while the sentence was excessive, it was not completely unwarranted. 

In a special category of profound differences in wartime were Marshal Philippe Pétain and General Charles de Gaulle’s exchange of death sentences, which as the victor, de Gaulle commuted so the Marshal could spend the last ten years of his very long life at leisure on the comfortable island of Île d’Yeu.

But more recently, former president Jacques Chirac had substantial legal problems after leaving office but ultimately benefited from the respect due to a former president – his sentence was suspended. Less clear are the charges against Chirac’s successor President Nicolas Sarkozy and his Prime Minister François Fillon. None of these recent cases have clearly emerged as either just or unjust in the court of public opinion but Sarkozy appears to be facing six months in prison and Fillon’s fate is unclear. The political futures of both appear to have been foreshortened as a result of them. It is indicative of his civility and equable decency that the present prime minister François Bayrou, who was himself acquitted in a scandal about paying for fictitious jobs and survived a controversy over suppression of information about clerical molestation of children in a religious order in his Pyrenees district, has expressed misgivings about the Le Pen judgement.

It is not clear, at least to the outsider, whether France is suffering from a comparative lack of ethics with numerous occupants of its highest offices of state, or is rather suffering from a pandemic of overheated politics leading to perversion of the prosecution system. It has always been clear, these last several years, that the latter condition is what afflicted the Biden administration as it flailed and floundered towards its end and attempted to fend off the adversary that it had likely cheated in 2020, by hurling a far-fetched series of impeachments and indictments against Donald Trump. It backfired badly in the late election and Mr. Trump has been acquitted by the largest jury in history (78 million voters).

Mme Le Pen deserves the presumption of innocence and the French appeal process has in all modern cases reduced sentences against prominent political indictees. But these charges are similar to more than a hundred others against Euro MP’s that have been settled with repayments and Mme. Le Pen remitted €330,000 several years ago. 

This reeks of the cancelled election in Romania, the spurious charges against Italian vice-premier Matteo Salvini, the prosecution of successive recent presidents of Brazil, and the fatuously unfounded charges against Donald Trump. Whether there is a legitimate complaint against Mme Le Pen or not, it won’t work: either she will be vindicated or will have to sit out the election and will lend her popularity to the RN nominee who will be able to run without her political baggage but with her support. The tired, globalist, euro-Federalist, climate change-alarmist soft Left is crumbling, and corrupt prosecutors will accelerate rather than soften their fall.

https://brusselssignal.eu/2025/04/a-history-of-french-political-convictions-lack-of-ethics-or-overheated-politics/