France, a nation that invented the concept of grandeur and has been coasting on it ever since, has sunk to a historic low in the annual Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index — a remarkable achievement in a year when it was competing against itself with two simultaneous high-profile corruption convictions. Former President Nicolas Sarkozy spent twenty days in actual prison in October after being found guilty of illegally seeking campaign funds from the late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, which raises the subsidiary question of what Gaddafi expected to receive for his investment and whether it was delivered.

Simultaneously, far-right National Rally leader Marine Le Pen and associates were convicted of embezzling European Parliament funds — an institution she has campaigned against for decades, apparently deciding that if you're going to oppose something, you should at least make it pay. Le Pen is appealing the verdict, the upholding of which would bar her from the 2027 presidential election, giving the French judiciary a role in the next election that would be unremarkable in Hungary and is causing considerable constitutional conversation in Paris.

France's corruption index decline is not attributable to a single scandal but to an accumulating weight of cases spanning the left, right, and center — a genuinely bipartisan achievement in a country that agrees on very little. The Fifth Republic's institutions remain intact. Its political class's relationship with other people's money, however, continues to invite annual international documentation.