The ‘Robespierreism’ of France

The conviction last month of Nicolas Sarkozy split opinion in France. For most conservatives, the former president’s five-year prison sentence for criminal conspiracy was a travesty of justice. For many on the left, Sarkozy, President ‘Bling-bling,’ as he was known during his time in office, finally got the punishment he deserved.

Sarkozy is a hard man to like, whatever one’s political persuasions: irascible, ostentatious and, as my colleague Hélène de Lauzun wrote in a recent analysis of his career, often entangled in “murky” associations.

Yet, five years for conspiracy despite being cleared of charges of corruption and illegal election campaign financing? That is a harsh sentence, as was the exécution provisoire, the immediate enforcement of his sentence without waiting for an appeal. This is a judicial mechanism usually applied to very dangerous criminals who are considered a flight risk or likely to re-offend.

It has since emerged that the judge who sentenced Sarkozy, Nathalie Gavarino, took part in a protest against him in 2011 when he was president. Gavarino, like many other magistrates, was outraged that Sarkozy had criticised their profession after the murder of a young woman by a repeat offender who should never have been released from prison.

Gavarino, incidentally, was the judge who in 2020 found another conservative icon, Francois Fillon, guilty of embezzling public funds. That scandal broke in early 2017 when Fillon was the frontrunner to win the spring presidential election. His campaign never recovered, and instead, a fresh-faced young man, a Socialist repackaged as a centrist called Emmanuel Macron, was elected.

The newspaper that broke the Fillon story was the left-wing Canard enchaîné; the one that launched the investigation into Sarkozy was the left-wing Mediapart. Curiously, the document that Mediapart published in 2012, which ultimately led to Sarkozy’s conviction (purported to have been written by Libya’s foreign intelligence services), was accepted by the court to be “most likely” a forgery.

Shortly after the conviction of Sarkozy, the writer and philosopher Alain Finkielkraut was asked for his thoughts on the affair. He described Mediapart as the modern L’Ami du peuple(The People’s Friend), the newspaper launched in 1789 by Jean-Paul Marat whose raison d’etre was to denounce ‘enemies’ of the Revolution.

Sarkoy’s conviction, declared Finkielkraut, was another example of the ‘Robespierreism’ of France, which he said was a national tradition.

Certainly, the man and his philosophy are still venerated by many on the Left.

In 2022, politicians from the far-left La France Insoumise visited Maximilien Robespierre’s hometown of Arras to commemorate his birthday; this pilgrimage was criticised as ‘historical ignorance’ by Clément Beaune, the Minister of Transport at the time.

Three months later, Beaune described Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National as the “No. 1 political enemy,” accusing the party of being “racist” and “xenophobic.” He urged France to show “no weakness in (the fight for) values.”

Robespierre displayed no weakness in his fight to preserve France’s ‘values.’ If one has the right values, one can consider oneself virtuous. In an address to the Convention on February 5, 1794, Robespierre outlined his political theory: 

Since the soul of the Republic is virtue, equality, and since your goal is to found, to consolidate the Republic, it follows that the first rule of your political conduct ought to be to relate all your efforts to maintaining equality and developing virtue.

The tyranny of virtue dominates France in the 21st century. The most powerful institutions are led by men and women—progressives, like Robespierre—who believe they are irreproachable: from the president of the Republic to the Constitutional Council (Supreme Court) to the State Council to the National Audit Office to the state-owned broadcaster to Arcom, the broadcasting regulator.

Politically, this virtue is manifested in the cordon sanitaire erected around Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National. Break this cordon, and one is instantly smeared as a ‘racist,’ ‘fascist’ or ‘xenophobe.’

There also exists a cultural cordon sanitaire. Last year, for example, a journalist was sacked by the state-owned France Radio for ‘breaches of ethical obligations.’ What were these breaches? He had discussed ghostwriting the autobiography of Jordan Bardella, the president of the Rassemblement National, the largest single political party in France.

In July this year, two journalists employed by the state-owned France Televisions were secretly filmed in a Paris bistro discussing strategy with senior officials from the Socialist Party. They were not dismissed for breaches of ethical obligations.

This provoked criticism from CNews, the independent news channel that has enjoyed a meteoric rise to become France’s most popular broadcaster of its kind. In response to the criticism, Delphine Ernotte, head of the state broadcaster, accused CNews of peddling an ‘extreme-right’ discourse.

She is not the first of her milieu to make such an accusation. Many left-wing politicians, among them Raphaël Glucksmann, tipped to be the Socialist candidate in the 2027 presidential election, refuse to appear on CNews because it is ‘extreme-right’.

CNews is not an extreme-right broadcaster; what Glucksmann really means is that it does not pump out the progressive dogma of the Paris elite. This is the caste to which Glucksmann belongs, as he admitted in a 2018 interview. “When I go to New York or Berlin, I feel more at home culturally than I do when I visit Picardy,” he explained.

There are some on the left who want to ban CNews, like the MP Aymeric Caron, who in 2023 called for its closure. In response, the centre-right senator Stéphane Le Rudulier said, “Let Mr. Caron and his friends go and live in North Korea, in keeping with their totalitarian dream.”

But why go to North Korea when they can pursue their totalitarian dream at home? In France this year, another popular anti-Progressive television station—C8—has been taken off the air, and Marine Le Pen has been banned from political life for five years. All in the name of virtue. Robespierre would be proud.