Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy has been stripped of the Legion of Honour, France’s highest distinction Taarifa reports.
According to emerging details, the decision to strip him off this honour resulted from his one-year prison sentence for corruption, according to a decree published Sunday in the Official Journal.
Sarkozy who ruled France from 2007 to 2012, has also been excluded from the National Order of Merit,.
He thus becomes the second French head of state to be deprived of this distinction after Marshal Pétain, from whom the Legion of Honour was withdrawn after his conviction in August 1945 for high treason and intelligence with the enemy.
Nicolas Sarkozy’s conviction was made final by the rejection of an appeal by the Court of Cassation in December.
In the wiretapping case, the former head of state was found guilty of having, in 2014, attempted to bribe a magistrate of the Court of Cassation, Gilbert Azibert, in the hope of obtaining confidential information and with the help of his lawyer, Thierry Herzog.
All three were sentenced, at first instance and on appeal, to the same three-year prison sentence, one of which was firm.
With the rejection of his final appeal in France, Nicolas Sarkozy was subject to exclusion from the Legion of Honour, which is automatic when a recipient is definitively convicted of a crime or receives a prison sentence of one year or more.
In these cases, the withdrawal is “by right”, stressed in March the Grand Chancellor of the Legion of Honour, General François Lecointre, who signed the decree depriving Nicolas Sarkozy of the two titles of which he was a Grand Cross, the highest rank.
In addition to the wiretapping, Nicolas Sarkozy is implicated in several legal cases and notably appeared in court in early 2025 on suspicion of Libyan financing of his 2007 presidential campaign.
