A sitting president takes on a former prime minister in a headline-hogging French legal case.
In only the latest episode of French politics at their ugliest, one of the highest profile trials in modern memory begins this week in Paris. Known as the Clearstream trial, it pits a sitting president, Nicolas Sarkozy, against a former prime minister, Dominique de Villepin—who is one of a handful of defendants in a convoluted story of corruption and frame-ups sure to settle onto French front pages for a full month. Villepin is accused of cultivating a corruption investigation against Sarkozy, knowing the evidence was phony, to smear his…