On: 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.