“A man who is committed to France.”

The Minister of Culture, Rachida Dati, near Nicolas Sarkozy, said she was “shocked” this Tuesday, June 17, for the exclusion of the Legion of Honor of the former President of the Republic after his conviction, which became definitively, to the year in prison for corruption in the case of listening.

“I have a lot of affection for Nicolas Sarkozy. (…) Why did you surprise me? Because people make the parallel with Marshal Pétain. There, I find that there is indignity,” he said in CNews/Europe 1 Rachida Dati, driven to the political scene by Nicolas Sarkozy in 2007.

“A man who is committed to France”

The former president (2007-2012), also excluded from the National Order of Merit, became the second chief of the Private French State of this distinction after Marshal Pétain, whom the Legion of Honor had been withdrawn after his conviction in August 1945 for a high betrayal and intelligence with the enemy.

“He is a man (Nicolas Sarkozy) who is committed to France. I always said: it is France that flows in his veins. We forget an important episode: (…) he kept more than twenty children during the hostage of children in Neuilly (in 1993 in a nursery school in a neighboring city of Neuilly, Neuilly-Seine, who was older, fiscal of Rachida.

“For this reason, he showed an act of courage, since he showed an act of courage when he was elected president of the Republic in the majority,” he said.

“President of the Republic is nothing. I consider that institutions are increasingly desecrated. I have a lot of respect for these institutions and, in particular, this supreme function that I still consider a bit sacred,” he added.

Hollande remembers that “there was no other option”

In the morning, François Hollande was also interviewed on this subject in France Inter. In reverse of certain political leaders on the right and its end, he insisted on the legitimacy of the sanction. “I don’t even understand it to surprise me,” he said. “This is the strict application of regulation.”

In fact, the exclusion of the Legion of Honor is automatic when one of its holders is definitely convicted of a crime or receives an imprisonment equal or more than a firm year.

“There was no other option. And I think it’s really painful,” concluded François Hollande for his former opponent in the 2012 presidential elections.