On: Judgement day for Marine Le Pen

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? -