On: Judgement day for Marine Le Pen

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.