It was a bitter setback for the French state and, in turn, for the Château de Versailles. On Monday, September 25, a judge at the Versailles administrative court suspended the enforcement of the disciplinary action taken against Alexandre Maral, a curator at the château, on July 6. The judge cited "serious doubts as to the legality of the disciplinary action and its proportionality in relation to the alleged offenses".

Detailed in a damning five-page order signed on July 6 by the government's secretary general, Claire Landais, the case concerns private tours of the château led by Maral, a civil servant in charge of sculptures. Surprised by the number and frequency of these visits, the château's director, Laurent Salomé, informed Maral of his concerns in an email in November 2022. Despite the warning, the curator persisted, organizing eight more visits in December of the same year.

An administrative investigation, carried out between January and April, brought to light some 20 lectures that the curator had given outside the Paris region, without any assignment from his employer or days' leave, except for five of them. These private visits and fee-based conferences, organized outside any regulatory framework, earned him €25,000 in 2022.

Summoned in February by Catherine Pégard and Salomé, Maral admitted to the facts of the case but maintained that the payment received was equivalent to copyright in the production of intellectual works. Following this meeting, the château's management sent a report to the Versailles public prosecutor.

In March, Maral was suspended from his duties as a precautionary measure. "Given his level of responsibility, he was necessarily aware that he was committing a fault by soliciting or accepting payments in return for acts facilitated by his position," reads the July 6 order.

The disciplinary action decided by the supervisory authorities was heavy: a temporary exclusion from duties for a period of two years with a six-month suspension, a punishment that the curator is contesting through an appeal for annulment. The order states: "The acts of which Mr. Maral is accused, likely to be qualified as offenses of misappropriation of public funds, passive corruption, breach of trust and embezzlement, constitute a serious and repeated breach of the aforementioned obligations that are associated with his status as a public servant and to his duties as curator of heritage."

However, in his September 25 order, the interim relief judge was far more magnanimous. "While M. A. is accused of having organized conferences to the detriment of his obligation to devote his entire professional work to the tasks entrusted to him, he has never been accused of not having achieved his objectives," wrote the judge, deeming that "it does not emerge from the documents in the file that M. A. attempted to conceal the payment of sums of money on the occasion of these guided tours, as the existence of these payments has been established in particular by the invoices he had drawn up."

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