Judgement day for Marine Le Pen

I have watched, across decades of public life, how men and women accused of peculation reach for the shield of popular sympathy when the shield of law has been torn from their grasp - and today I watch it again, as this woman stands before the judgment of a court she once sat in as a legislator, hoping, we are told, for leniency.

They will say - her defenders will say, are already saying - that the prosecution is political, that the sums are trivial beside the budgets of larger scandals, that to condemn her is to condemn a movement, that the verdict will be read by millions as a verdict upon them. I grant the force of the last point. It is no small thing to punish a figure around whom a faction has organized its identity. The Republic trembles when judgment falls upon one who commands a following.

But the Republic trembles far more when those who write its laws feel entitled to loot its treasury. Four million euros, diverted from an institution she was sworn to serve, through employees paid to perform functions they never performed - this is not a clerical error. This is not enthusiasm. This is the architecture of theft, constructed deliberately, maintained over years, defended now by the only argument left to those whose facts will not bear examination: that accountability itself is persecution.

How long shall we tolerate the fiction that popular support confers immunity? The courts do not ask whether the accused is beloved. They ask whether the money was taken. They ask whether the positions were fictitious. They ask whether the accused knew.

If the answer is yes, the Republic demands its verdict - and no faction, no following, no movement may stand between the law and its conclusion.

The spectacle of a woman who has spent a lifetime dissecting the French body politic now finding herself subjected to its judicial scalpel is, in the highest degree, ironic. The specimen before us is Marine Le Pen, a creature of the booboisie who has long pretended to be its high priestess, only to discover that the altar is made of glass and easily shattered. She stands accused of embezzling four and a half million euros from the European Parliament, a sum that would have bought a small kingdom in the eighteenth century but now serves only as the price of her political immortality.

It is a curious pathology, this reliance on the state’s treasury by those who claim to despise it. She has fed upon the very beast she claimed to slay, and now the beast bites back. The press review suggests she hopes for acquittal, or at least leniency, which is to say she hopes for the continued mercy of the system she has spent years demonizing. This is the democratic paradox in its purest form: the people who demand the destruction of institutions are the first to beg those same institutions for protection when the wheels of justice begin to turn.

The party behind her, already reeling, watches with the dull-eyed resignation of a herd animal waiting for the wolf to finish its meal. They know that her fall is not merely personal but structural; it exposes the hollowness of the entire enterprise. The verdict will not change the nature of the beast, only its shape. The booboisie will continue to cheer, not because they believe in justice, but because they enjoy the theater of the fall. It is a grand, sordid comedy, and I, for one, shall watch it with the detached interest of a naturalist observing a rare insect break its own wing.

Today’s news of Marine Le Pen’s trial unsettles me, though I cannot yet name why. The figures are stark - €4.4 million, a sum that sounds like a folktale’s ransom, not the bloodless ledger of modern politics - and yet what grips me is not the crime alleged but the vertigo of judgment itself. I think of the vineyard’s oldest press, its wooden jaws grinding relentlessly, neither good nor evil, only force. So too the tribunal: it crushes or releases, but never explains the weight of the grapes.

I find myself split, as so often. Part of me craves the clarity of a verdict, a clean severance between guilt and innocence, as though justice were a surgeon’s knife. But another part remembers the men I’ve known - magistrates, merchants, even friends - who wore their roles like borrowed cloaks, neither wholly dishonest nor pure, but tangled in the needs of the moment. Can one steal from an institution one despises? Is it theft, or a perverse tax on hypocrisy? The question coils back on itself. - And I have thought about this longer than is healthy - Twenty years ago, a steward in my employ mismanaged the harvest accounts. Not malice, but desperation; his son lay ill, and the doctors demanded silver. I let him go, but did not prosecute. Was that mercy, or complicity? The memory nags now. For if I, a private man, could not untangle justice from compassion, how may we expect it of a body like the European Parliament, that vast and distant thing?

The crowds outside the court will chant for blood or salvation, depending on their banners. But I think of the accused - how the weight of a trial is not in the law, but in the waiting. My own lawsuits, interminable and costly, taught me that the process itself is a kind of punishment, a slow bleeding of hope. Whether she is guilty or no, the machinery grinds.

A line from Plutarch comes unbidden: “The difference between a traitor and a patriot is less than the thickness of a coin.” But perhaps that is a coward’s excuse. I want to believe in reckoning, in some balance that rights the scales. Yet the older I grow, the more I see scales are only balanced by hands that themselves tremble.

I will watch, but without expectation. The verdict, when it comes, will not settle the deeper unease - that power, once taken, is measured in accounts we cannot audit, not in euros or laws, but in the quiet erosion of what we claim to value. - And yet I write this in a room filled with books, the spoils of a life that has never known hunger. Who am I to judge the hunger of others? -