Monsieur le marquis Wallerand de Saint-Just d'Autingues, to use his full noble title, has a long history of courtoom experience, and knows how to courteously evade answering questions. Not only because he had been the far-right Front National (FN) party's lawyer for 40 years, and subsidiarily that of former icon Brigitte Bardot, but because he, as the party's then-treasurer, was already sentenced, in 2023, to a six-month suspended sentence and a two-year ban on holding elected office for "concealment of misuse of social assets" in the Jeanne case, a cunning scheme to finance the party's 2012 parliamentary elections campaign.
Saint-Just, 74 (who has few things in common with Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, a close associate of the revolutionary leader Robespierre, except that they were both elected in the northern Aisne department and failed to get elected in Paris), readily cloaks himself in a show of good faith and, on Monday, November 4, at the trial concerning the FN's European parliamentary assistants, spoke out indignantly against the slightest defamatory suspicion. Since 2009, he was the FN's volunteer treasurer; for twelve years, he was a member of the party's political bureau, then its executive bureau, and even its vice president; and, from 2024, has been a party employee for legal and judicial affairs. Since joining the FN in 1986, he has run in every election, "except for the presidency of the Republic," joked the defendant.
In 2016, the FN's financial situation was not brilliant: Over three years, its expenses had risen from €140,000 to €662,000, and its total debt exceeded €9.1 million. "We mainly had a cash flow problem," pleaded the lawyer. "In truth, the movement's situation was healthy and would only improve." In the meantime, costs had to be cut, and the prosecution suspects him of having taken advantage of the European Parliament's budget for hiring parliamentary assistants, relieving the party's finances by hiring employees for fake jobs.
Evidence abounds. He had seen no harm in the EU Parliament paying FN co-founder Jean-Marie Le Pen's bodyguard a €21,000 severance package when he changed his parliamentary assistant contract, nor when Le Pen's devoted secretary became an assistant to former party number two Bruno Gollnisch – on paper, at least. He said he was no longer sure whether he had noticed when Marine Le Pen's chief of staff was also assigned to the Strasbourg Parliament; or whether Yann Maréchal, Marine's sister, who was in charge of major events at the party's headquarters, had gone the same way.
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