July 7th has huge significance for ultra-nationalists in France, especially Roman Catholics like Marine Le Pen, the far-right leader who will shortly have her own fate decided on that day.
Joan of Arc’s future status as France’s patron saint was assured on 7 July, 1456. Judges sitting in Rouen, Normandy, annulled an earlier trial verdict by a pro-English ecclesiastical court, which had seen Joan burned at the stake as a heretic.
She would eventually be elevated to the personification of patriotic, pure France that Le Pen’s party, the National Rally, now champions.
Le Pen, 57, will face her own day in court on Tuesday, when appeal court judges will decide whether she’s going to serve a prison sentence and, crucially for France, whether or not she will be barred from standing in the 2027 presidential elections.
Last year, she was found guilty of embezzling taxpayers’ money, and a panel of judges will rule on whether the conviction should be upheld or dropped. Le Pen has already said, “I’m a believer, so I believe in miracles”.
As it stands, Le Pen, who has often been seen as the face of Europe’s far right, faces a four-year jail term, a €100,000 (£86,000) fine, and – perhaps most importantly – a five-year ban on standing for public office.
With Emmanuel Macron unable to run again due to constitutional limits, Le Pen had been widely tipped to finally make it to the Élysée Palace, at the fourth time of asking. She lost to Macron in 2022, but recent opinion polls have her going one better next year. This is what makes the 7 July appeal court ruling so critical.
Another legal setback could mean the end of LePenism, the populist doctrine that has dominated far-right politics in France for more than half a century.
Marine Le Pen with her father, Jean-Marie, at a National Front congress in 2014 (Photo: Robert Pratta/Reuters)The National Rally party was founded in 1972 by Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, a noted Holocaust denier who was convicted of, among other things, inciting racial violence. In the years since, the party’s nativist mindset has embraced a mythical France that is both parochial and xenophobic, with policies centred on deporting immigrants and pushing back against manifestations of globalism, including the European Union.
Following the UK’s Brexit vote in 2016 and the election of Donald Trump in America, such tendencies have found a huge constituency.
The National Rally has been emboldened, but it also prides itself on being a party of law and order. If Le Pen, a qualified lawyer, fails to legally clear her name, the party’s rebranding as a mainstream political force capable of serious governance would suffer a significant blow.
Instead, it could be viewed as a resolutely sleazy organisation that saw up to €4.4m (£3.79m) intended for use by parliamentary assistants in Brussels and Strasbourg diverted back to party coffers in Paris, while Le Pen and others worked as MEPs.
Prosecutors described Le Pen as being “at the centre” of this, along with her father, who avoided prosecution because of his advanced age. He died in 2025 at the age of 96.
This was not occasional criminality, according to prosecutors, who said it went on for at least a decade until 2021.
As those of us who have sat through many of the court sessions involving Le Pen can attest, she has constantly played the victim card, accusing a “tyranny of judges” of carrying out a “political assassination”. Those on the right, including Trump and groups in Britain, back her.
A drawing of Le Pen attending the verdict and sentencing in her and her co-defendants’ trial on charges of embezzlement (Photo: Benoit Peyrucq/AFP)The stakes are certainly high, with many believing that Le Pen’s political career is now likely damaged beyond repair. But the case against her has also harmed France.
Bénédicte de Perthuis, the original trial judge, was placed under police protection after he received death threats. State prosecutor Thierry Ramonatxo said Le Pen had chosen “to attack judges on the political stage rather than to reflect upon what she had been reproached for.”
Perhaps tellingly, only 12 of the 25 defendants convicted in the first trial appealed, and Le Pen is already talking about handing over her 2027 presidential candidacy to her protégé Jordan Bardella, the party’s current president.
Bardella, 30, who has been described by Le Pen as “my lion cub”, is a university drop-out and has spent his short adult life largely as a National Rally apparatchik.
He’s not considered to be an accomplished politician and, most significantly, he is not a Le Pen. His succession would break a decades-long dynasty on France’s far right.
This puts added pressure on the 7 July verdict. If Le Pen loses her appeal and the party stops being an electoral vehicle for her family, it could radically reshape one of Europe’s most prominent far-right movements.
It’s not the Ides of March, but a loss for Le Pen could also further cement the day in French history.
Nabila Ramdani is a French journalist and academic of Algerian descent and the author of Fixing France: How to Repair a Broken Republic.
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