‘If you want to be a great politician, you need great troubles; petty troubles are for petty politicians.’ So declared Nicolas Sarkozy in 2018, leaping to the defence of his protégé Gérald Darmanin – now Macron’s justice minister, then facing several rape accusations. By his own metric, Sarkozy sits comfortably among the greats of the Fifth Republic. This Thursday, the former president appeared before a Paris magistrates’ court to hear the verdict in his corruption trial, accused of taking millions – perhaps as many as fifty – from Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya to bankroll his 2007 presidential campaign.

The proceedings were of rare magnitude: more than a decade of investigation, thirteen defendants including the former head of state, three of his ministers and a handful of high-flying middlemen. A sizeable crowd turned out for the occasion – two courtrooms filled to capacity, with an overflow auditorium showing the session on a giant screen. Among the defendants, Sarkozy sat beside his childhood friend and former Minister for National Identity Brice Hortefeux; behind them, in the public benches, were Sarkozy’s wife, Carla Bruni, and three sons, including Louis, a twenty-something New York University graduate and rising star of France’s populist right. Opposite sat representatives of the Libyan state, a civil party in the case, joined by anti-corruption NGOs and families of the victims of UTA Flight 772, brought down over the Ténéré desert, a bombing attributed to Gaddafi’s intelligence services. Conspicuously absent was Ziad Takieddine, the fixer long accused of serving as the main conduit of Libyan funds to Sarkozy’s circle. He had died two days earlier in the city of Tripoli, Lebanon, where he was evading an arrest warrant – ‘a bitter coincidence’, remarked the presiding magistrate.

When the sentences came down, they were heavy. Alexandre Djouhri, the Franco-Algerian power broker once thought untouchable, was given six years in prison with an immediate committal order. Sarkozy received five years, with incarceration deferred: he has a few weeks to turn himself in, though at seventy his age makes him eligible for special consideration, to be determined on appeal in six months’ time. At some 400 pages, the judgement is a landmark ruling. Sarkozy stands convicted of criminal conspiracy, with the court affirming that between 2005 and 2007 his entourage maintained clandestine contacts with the Libyan regime. But he was acquitted of the charge of illegal campaign financing: while investigators identified suspect flows of money from Libya, they were unable to prove conclusively that the funds in question had reached the ex-president. The court also dismissed a document long central to the case – a purported note from Gaddafi’s foreign minister Moussa Koussa, dated December 2006, pledging €50 million for Sarkozy’s campaign. First published by Mediapart in 2012, the document was putatively found amid a trove of Takieddine’s personal papers supplied to the press by his ex-wife.

French coverage largely treated the trial as a morality play about Sarkozy’s greed. Certainly, much can be said about money and the man once nicknamed the ‘bling-bling president’, who appeared at court hearings this spring wearing an electronic ankle tag from a separate conviction for influence peddling. Beyond a tale of his venal appetites, however, this episode opens a window onto how French political life has operated for half a century. Tellingly, the judgement rested on a distinction between Sarkozy’s conduct before and after his election. Convicted of seeking to procure funds via Libyan contacts in the run-up to 2007, when internecine rivalry left him unsure of access to the party war chest, his lavish reception of Gaddafi once in office – accompanied by major defence and security contracts – was treated as standard practice in dealings with Tripoli.

The suspicion of impropriety that has hovered over Sarkozy did not come out of nowhere. Proceeds from arms sales have long been one of the hidden currencies of French politics. Every major producing country has had its scandals: Lockheed bribed foreign officials to purchase its Starfighter jets in the 1960s and 70s; BAE Systems’ al-Yamamah deal with the Saudi royal family implicated Margaret Thatcher’s son as a middleman; funds from Thyssen armoured-vehicle sales abroad flowed back into CDU coffers under Helmut Kohl. France, however, seems to stand apart. For more than a century its political life has been coloured by les affaires. Today revelations from outlets like Le Canard enchaîné or Mediapart constitute the warp and weft of partisan debate. Two factors help explain this. First, France’s unusually strict campaign-finance rules – no corporate donations, capped individual contributions, and tight overall spending limits – create incentives for parallel funding channels. Second, a largely self-sufficient defence industry, insulated from American patronage, leaves intermediaries and political sponsors to compete freely on the domestic stage.

In this sense, l’affaire libyenne is the culmination of a longer history, one characterised by decades of political infighting over control of shadow money, with arms contracts arguably the most lucrative stream. Its sources run deep in the Fifth Republic. De Gaulle’s return to power in 1958 was meant to stabilize the country after years of parliamentary turmoil. Under a quasi-one-party system, the Gaullist Rally of the French People (RPF) financed itself through institutional channels: discretionary budget lines at the Élysée and key ministries, supplemented by contributions from industrialists handpicked by the General after the Liberation – above all in oil and arms, both dominated by the tightly knit elite of Corps des Mines engineers.

On the oil side, the creation in 1966 of the parastatal conglomerate Elf gave France an economic arm abroad, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, where briefcases of cash ensured the cooperation of local rulers while sustaining political careers at home. The defence industry, meanwhile, consolidated around Dassault Aviation. At the twilight of French colonialism, anticipating the inevitable downsizing of the national armed forces, its powerful owner Marcel Dassault steered the sector towards exports. The Mirage III fighter, developed in the wake of Điện Biên Phủ, was made for this purpose – first sold to Israel, then to Arab clients after de Gaulle’s embargo following the Six-Day War.

Flooding the Gulf monarchies with cash, the 1973 oil shock opened a new bonanza for the defence sector. Western suppliers competed for access to Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, where what mattered most was not the quality of the weapons themselves but intermediaries capable of securing a handshake and signature from local leaders. Contracts started to carry commissions of around 20 per cent for these fixers, perfectly legal until an OECD ban in 2000. Part of the take typically flowed back to the exporting country, filling campaign coffers or the private accounts of political patrons.

It was in this climate that Valéry Giscard d’Estaing came to power in 1974, succeeding Gaullism’s enfant terrible, Georges Pompidou. Although never a Gaullist himself, and often seen as close to Washington, Giscard nonetheless embraced de Gaulle’s view that arms sales were a pillar of national sovereignty, a way of pursuing an independent line outside Cold War blocs. Under his presidency France rose to third place among global exporters, behind the US and the USSR. Saudi Arabia was the prize market, dominated by brokers close to the royal family like Adnan Khashoggi and Prince Bandar. French matériel found favour, notably Matra’s Exocet anti-ship missile, later made famous by the Argentinian Air Force in the Falklands and destined to become a bestseller in the Middle East.

To superintend this policy, Giscard relied on a rising Gaullist from Pompidou’s entourage, Jacques Chirac, whom he named prime minister. Chirac took the opportunity to shuttle across the southern and eastern Mediterranean, cultivating ties with leaders from the Moroccan monarchy to Hafez al-Assad’s dictatorship in Syria. In 1976, realizing Giscard had no intention of sharing power, he left Matignon, seized the remnants of the Gaullist apparatus and soon after won the Paris mayoralty, a perch from which he maintained his connections in the Arab world.

François Mitterrand’s election in 1981 marked a turning point. His victory, bringing to a close two decades of centre-right hegemony, reshaped the rules of the game. The disclosure of illicit funding schemes tied to his own Socialist Party prompted the president to introduce campaign-finance reforms. Corporate donations were banned and replaced by public subsidies indexed to electoral results, while overall spending was capped well below the real cost of a national race. The laws passed between 1988 and 1990 also included a discreet amnesty for past offences. With the judiciary now drawn into the policing of political money, the old porteurs de valises – often rank-and-file militants whose main asset was party loyalty – vanished and were replaced on the French side by a new professional class of intermediaries, versed in complex laundering schemes, adept at evading subpoenas and navigating factional divides.

Global turbulence also shook up the scene. The oil glut of the mid-1980s dried up demand in the Gulf, forcing Paris to seek new markets. India and Greece, led by fellow members of the Socialist International, offered some outlets, but the real action looked to be in Taiwan. Diplomatically isolated by US-China normalization under Carter, the wealthy island saw in French military hardware the means to slip between Beijing and one of the PRC’s oldest Western partners. The Taiwanese Navy expressed interest in a broad range of acquisitions, particularly La Fayette frigates jointly developed by the state shipyard DCN and electronics group Thomson-CSF.

Mitterrand’s presidency also witnessed two periods of political cohabitation – the peculiar arrangement in which a French president must govern alongside a prime minister from the opposing majority in parliament. In 1986, after the right took control of the Assemblée, Mitterrand appointed Jacques Chirac, leader of the neo-Gaullist RPR, as prime minister. The experiment sharpened rivalries within the right; Chirac lost the 1988 presidential race to Mitterrand and grew wary of what came to be known as the ‘Matignon curse’. When the right returned to power in the 1993 legislative elections, Chirac preferred to bide his time and allowed his confidant Édouard Balladur to take the premiership. Balladur promised to stand aside in the 1995 presidential contest but soon reneged, entering the race himself and splitting the Gaullist camp.

It was at this juncture that Nicolas Sarkozy stepped onto the national stage. The young mayor of affluent Neuilly-sur-Seine, first spotted by Chirac in the Gaullist youth movement, was recruited by Balladur as a key lieutenant in his bid for power. But Balladur’s ambitions collided with a hard fact: in 1993 Chirac still controlled the party coffers and its funding networks. The new prime minister was left to find his own resources, and arms sales offered a bounty of opportunity. From Matignon he placed loyalists in strategic posts, including Sarkozy at Bercy, now responsible for countersigning all defence contracts. Reviving negotiations opened under the Socialists, the Balladuriens pushed through the La Fayette deal with Taiwan, worth more than €2 billion, with commissions rumoured to reach as high as 30 per cent despite a contractual ban on such payments.

Alongside the Taiwan deal, Balladur’s government pursued its own ventures: a border-security programme with Saudi Arabia (known as MIKSA) and the sale of DCN’s Agosta-class submarines to Pakistan. Both involved hefty kickbacks that prosecutors later argued helped fund the 1995 presidential campaign. Balladur, with Sarkozy as his campaign manager, claimed improbably that some €2.5 million discovered in campaign coffers came from selling T-shirts and pins bearing the candidate’s face. The two contracts also relied on a new channel of intermediation. If France once profited from close ties with veteran brokers like Khashoggi, by the 1980s Dassault and other contractors were routinely losing bids against Anglo-American competition. The defence and political establishments accordingly sought to build alternative networks. Balladur’s team turned to Takieddine, a Druze from Lebanon who was running a ski resort in the French Alps when he crossed paths with a former Khashoggi associate and subsequently reinvented himself as a go-between from Parisian salons to the Greater Middle East.

Faced with these rival initiatives, Chirac’s camp secured its own fixer. A Frenchman of Algerian origin, Alexandre (born Ahmed) Djouhri’s path is worthy of Balzac: a rough childhood in the Paris banlieue in the 1960s, brushes with petty crime, a run-in with state security police who spotted his instinct for navigating the demi-monde. Journalist Pierre Péan – France’s Seymour Hersh – devoted one of his last books to Djouhri, surely among the most intriguing figures in French power circles in recent decades. Péan traced his ascent through chance encounters with African strongmen, a likely initiation into one of France’s main Masonic lodges, and eventual closeness with Dominique de Villepin, Chirac’s trusted lieutenant and Sarkozy’s future nemesis. After Chirac’s presidential victory in 1995, Villepin made Djouhri the Chiraquiens’ point man in the Gulf, tasked with dismantling the Takieddine network and replacing it with a more dependable Saudi axis. The rivalry between Djouhri and Takieddine would continue well into the 2000s, and the two would go on to be central figures in the Sarkozy-Libya trial.

These political antagonisms mirrored a deeper struggle within French capitalism. The early post-Cold War years were an age of consolidation in the defence industry: in the US, the so-called ‘Last Supper’ of 1993 prompted Lockheed to merge with Martin and Boeing to swallow McDonnell Douglas. In France, Thomson-CSF, historically linked to the Socialists and later to Balladur, was pitted against Matra, the missile-maker of businessman Jean-Luc Lagardère, long an ally and friend of Chirac. Whoever prevailed at home would carry the tricolore abroad.

The 1995 presidential race settled the score in Matra’s favour. Alain Gomez, Thomson’s CEO, was forced out by the new president. He later remarked, in a phrase that entered political folklore, that he had ‘buttered both tartines [Balladur and the Socialists] but forgot the ham [Chirac]’. The Balladuriens fell into disgrace. Sarkozy was excluded from Chirac’s inner circle and replaced by loyalists like Alain Juppé and Villepin. But Chirac quickly ran into a wall. His first major initiative, a reform of social security, provoked fierce union resistance. In December 1995 more than a million people marched through Paris; the government backed down. On Villepin’s advice, Chirac dissolved the National Assembly to try to restore legitimacy but the gamble backfired, handing the left a snap-election victory. Juppé was sacrificed. Sarkozy used the interlude to rebuild, leaving palace intrigue to Villepin and casting himself as the party’s man on the ground. Omnipresent on television – particularly TF1, owned by his crony the construction magnate Martin Bouygues – he staked his brand on law and order.

Chirac’s re-election in 2002, after Jean-Marie Le Pen’s shock advance to the second round, consecrated Sarkozy’s strategy. Questions of security dominated public debate, and as interior minister he basked in the limelight, setting his eyes on the presidency in 2007. Having watched Chirac cultivate Arab ties since the 1970s, Sarkozy knew that a presidential résumé was forged abroad. In a 2004 speech to the American Jewish Committee in New York, he declared in broken English: ‘In France they call me Sarkozy the American – I am proud of that.’ He drew close to Qatar’s prime minister Hamad bin Jassim, linchpin of Doha’s alignment with Washington. For the Qataris, discreet backers of the Iraq invasion, Sarkozy offered an Atlanticist counterweight to a French political class still steeped in de Gaulle’s pro-Arab line. It may have been through this channel, and Qatar’s pull in the Muslim Brotherhood, that he gravitated towards Gaddafi’s Libya.

But the ghosts of the Balladur years returned. In May 2002 a bus in Karachi was blown up, killing eleven French engineers who were in Pakistan to oversee the construction of Agosta submarines for DCN. Suspicion initially fell on al-Qaeda – Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl had been murdered by jihadi militants in the city three months earlier. But in Parisian corridors another version circulated: Pakistani intelligence officers had ordered the attack in retaliation for kickbacks frozen on the Agosta deal. After taking office in 1995, Chirac had instructed his defence minister to halt all payments tied to Balladur-era contracts.

As budget minister at the time, Sarkozy should have been in the line of fire. Yet the inquiry remained focused on the ‘al-Qaeda angle’ championed by Judge Jean-Louis Bruguière, who would later endorse Sarkozy in the 2007 election. The episode only sharpened tensions with the Chiraquiens, Villepin chief among them. Unscathed by Karachi, Sarkozy faced the same problem as Balladur: financing his ambitions while his rivals controlled the party purse. As early as 1995, Chirac had installed Villepin at the head of a discreet Élysée unit tasked with tracking down the Balladur war chest. The search soon centred on Sarkozy, by then emerging as Villepin’s main rival for the succession. The Chiraquiens suspected him of reviving the old Saudi pipeline through Takieddine, including the gigantic border-security programme MIKSA, initiated under Balladur in 1994 and dubbed ‘the contract of the century’ on account of its promised commissions. On the eve of its signing in 2004, Chirac barred Sarkozy – by that point interior minister – from flying to Riyadh, insisting the deal be handled between heads of state.

Thus began what came to be known as the Clearstream affair. In late 2003 a Lebanese trader approached Villepin’s entourage, claiming to have uncovered secret accounts in the ledgers of a Luxembourg clearing house. The list included politicians and businessmen of all stripes, but one name riveted the Élysée: Nicolas Sarkozy. Villepin believed he had found the smoking gun. With Chirac’s tacit blessing, the documents were passed to an investigating magistrate. In January 2006 the trap sprung closed: the accounts were forgeries, cooked up by the trader himself. Overnight, Sarkozy looked like the victim of a smear. His libel suit cast a shadow on Villepin, already reeling from a wave of student protests – unrest that one movement leader would later admit had been quietly fanned by Sarkozy’s friends in the police. By the summer, Sarkozy had emerged as the right’s leading candidate for the presidency.

Djouhri, sensing the political winds, made peace with Sarkozy after years on Villepin’s side. A spring 2006 meeting at the Bristol Hotel, where Djouhri was a regular, confirmed that Sarkozy would be the sole candidate of the right to run the following year; with access to party coffers assured, need for the Libyan backchannel dissipated. The rapprochement paid off: when Libya sought to modernize its air force in the early 2000s, Dassault had deployed Djouhri, while Safran, working through Sarkozy, relied on Takieddine. Under Sarkozy’s presidency, Dassault secured the contract and Djouhri surfaced in one industrial succession battle after another, not least at EDF and Areva, where his proxies pushed for sharing French nuclear expertise with China, Qatar, and the Emirates.

Initially tapped by the new occupant of the Elysée for contacts in Syria, Takieddine soon became a liability for Sarkozy. In 2011 he was stopped at Le Bourget airport with €1.5 million in cash. Questioned by magistrates probing Libyan financing of the 2007 campaign, he testified against his former employer. In 2016 the rogue middleman went further, declaring that he himself had delivered suitcases of Libyan cash to Sarkozy’s entourage. He was later sentenced to five years in prison but evaded incarceration by fleeing to Lebanon.

The Djouhri saga stretched into the Macron years. During the contested merger of utility giants Veolia and Suez, finalized in 2020, Djouhri was rumoured to hold up to ten per cent of Veolia’s shares on behalf of principals, Péan suggested, even less fond of the spotlight than himself. The 2017 election did mark a rupture of sorts, as the long-standing Gaullist-Socialist duopoly collapsed into a single ‘bourgeois bloc’, leaving power in the hands of a technocratic state apparatus less constrained by electoral cycles. Abroad, too, the landscape shifted with France’s retreat – at least on paper – from its last military redoubts in Africa, long a showroom for the national arms industry. With German rearmament spawning new industrial champions, often in tandem with US defence contractors, France’s position as the world’s second-largest weapons exporter looks increasingly precarious.

Sarkozy’s demeanour on Thursday conveyed something of the prevailing ambivalence in French power circles. Stepping out of the courtroom into a thicket of cameras, he delivered a five-minute monologue, clearly prepared in advance, casting himself once again as the victim of a politico-journalistic cabal. For a man facing half a decade behind bars, he seemed remarkably blasé. The court’s sentence is substantial, but its enforcement remains uncertain. His acquittal on illegal campaign financing, and the court’s dismissal of Mediapart’s so-called Koussa memo, left his defence intact. Politically, however, the ruling is a blow. With appeals pending, Sarkozy’s subterranean influence on the right is likely to remain muted, not least in view of Macron’s probable successor, former prime minister Édouard Philippe. A protégé of Alain Juppé, the last of the Chiraquiens, Philippe’s tall, affable persona contrasts sharply with Sarkozy’s abrasive style; relations between the two men are notoriously poisonous.

Macron, for his part, ran for office on a programme of renewal, and some early gestures suggested a break with precedent: in 2018 he declined to greet Djouhri at a reception at the Algerian embassy. The new administration distanced itself from the crudeness of its predecessors’ methods, but telltale signs persisted. A case in point is Alexis Kohler, Macron’s éminence grise throughout his presidency, a polished civil servant unencumbered by Sarkozy’s unembarrassed greed or Villepin’s shady acquaintances. He was forced to resign last spring after eight years as Élysée secretary-general, hounded by conflict-of-interest probes over Vincent Bolloré’s sale of his logistics arm to MSC, the Italian group run by Kohler’s maternal cousins. He has since been appointed head of Société Générale’s investment bank, the same institution that once channelled payments in the Taiwan frigate affair. Plus ça change . . .

Read on: Serge Halimi, ‘Condition of France’, NLR 144