In 1759, British Adm. John Byng was executed by firing squad for “failing to do his utmost” to relieve Minorca, a Mediterranean island besieged by the French navy. This minor episode in the Seven Years’ War, known in these parts as the French and Indian War, inspired a scene in Voltaire’s satirical novel Candide. When the naif Candide witnesses a naval officer’s execution in Britain, he is told, “In this country, it’s good to kill an admiral from time to time, pour encourager les autres.”

The joke is that law and sentencing are supposed to discourage others. In this sense, the conviction on March 31 of the French populist Marine Le Pen for embezzlement looks conventional. As the prosecution showed, between 2004 and 2016, Le Pen’s party, the National Front, diverted European Parliament subsidies for its representatives’ expenses to the party’s domestic staff. Le Pen insisted she had not broken the law, but the judge concluded that she was “at the heart” of this illegal scheme. Le Pen is now banned from running for election for five years. She also received a fine and a four-year prison sentence: two years wearing an electronic tag rather than in jail and the other two suspended.

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At the time, Le Pen was running far ahead of the field in first-round polling for France’s 2027 presidential election. In polling for the second-round runoff, Le Pen was well ahead of one possible opponent, the communist Jean-Luc Mélenchon, and neck-and-neck with the other, the centrist Edouard Philippe. She can continue to serve in the National Assembly, where she leads the National Rally, the successor party to the National Front. She will appeal to the higher court and may well secure an annulment. But by then, it will probably be too late.

The appeal proceedings may not open before the 2027 elections. If they do, Le Pen will be campaigning as a convicted felon sporting an electronic anklet, and possibly even reduced by house arrest to Biden-style campaigning from her home. This degradation is built into Le Pen’s sentence. Though filing an appeal should, under French law, return her to the status of an innocent person, the judge made an exception. Citing the seriousness of her case, he ruled that the ban would not be lifted by filing an appeal. And Le Pen’s case is serious. A Le Pen victory in 2027 would be an earthquake for France and the European Union.

President Donald Trump’s enemies wanted to create a similar scenario when they built a stack of mostly piffling charges against him in 2024. None of them stuck, and they encouraged more voters than they discouraged. Le Pen’s response sounds like Trump, too: “Tyrant judges,” she told the French parliament, are trying to “steal the presidential election.” Did the spectacle of Democratic prosecutors and politicians devising new degradations for American democracy encourager les autres in Europe?

True, the French have no word for “lawfare,” as we now call it. No doubt they will soon speak of le lawfare, as though political prosecutions are a vile Anglo-Saxon import, like le royale with cheese. This will fit the grand tradition of Europeans pinning their problems on the Americans. But the people who came up with the Dreyfus affair have their own grand traditions of judicial corruption and embezzlement.

In February 2024, another party leader, François Beyrou, was acquitted after a seven-year trial on similar embezzlement charges. When Beyrou denied any knowledge of the graft, the judge said he gave Beyrou the “benefit of the doubt”. Beyrou is one of President Emmanuel Macron’s closest allies. In December 2024, Macron appointed him prime minister.

The misuse of European Parliament funding for domestic ends is, the British commentator Michael Crick said after Le Pen’s sentence, “one of the great scandals” of our time. Before Brexit, Crick said, Britain’s Liberal Democrats “reemployed” their EU-funded staffers “around the country” for their domestic campaign. “Everyone in the European Parliament was at it,” Crick said, “and they all knew each other was at it, so they didn’t complain, because they’d be complaining against themselves.”

FRANCE DID TO LE PEN WHAT DEMOCRATS TRIED TO DO TO TRUMP

Crick, who is no friend to Le Pen or the Right, admitted that politicians are “more likely to fall foul” of prosecution if, like Le Pen, they are Euroskeptics, and more likely to get away with it if, like the Liberal Democrats, they support the European Union. He also noted that the European Parliament was “reluctant” to investigate corruption. The European media seem oddly discouraged about investigating it, too.

If we see a similar dynamic in French politics, it is because the European Union is the French system writ large: a rigid, opaque technocracy that distrusts its own voters and seeks to nullify democratic opposition. If we also see it in the United States, it is because much of the American bureaucracy shares these impulses and has acted on them. It is easy to say that in France, the abuse of judicial process is the greater danger to democracy. It is hard to say the same in the American case, but it is true nonetheless.

Dominic Green is a Washington Examiner columnist and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Find him on X @drdominicgreen.