Chirac formally charged with embezzlement

The malfeasance cases - also involving Dominique de Villepin, former prime minister, and Charles Pasqua, former interior minister, among others - have pulled back a curtain on the back rooms of French politics, depicting powerful figures engaging in a mix of high finance, arms marketing, dirty tricks, and personal vendettas in Paris.

Pasqua, 82, a combative senator who battled German occupation troops as a teenager, was convicted Tuesday of peddling influence to an Israeli arms dealer and sentenced to a year of hard time. Since then, he has called on the government to release classified files on French arms sales abroad and urged Chirac to “assume his responsibilities’’ in the case of clandestine weapons sales to Angola in the 1990s arranged by a slick French businessman and the Israeli billionaire.

Also convicted in the arms sales case was Jean-Christophe Mitterrand, son of the late President Francois Mitterrand and one of his advisers on Africa. He was given a two-year suspended jail sentence and fined a half-million dollars for taking commissions to put the businessmen in touch with Angolan leaders in connection with the arms sales.

Villepin, a former diplomat and Chirac protege, was put on trial last month and accused of allowing circulation of a falsified list of illegal bank accounts including the name of President Nicolas Sarkozy, who was Villepin’s main rival. After six weeks of courtroom drama featuring a would-be Lebanese spy, a hoodwinked French intelligence officer and a rack of histrionic lawyers, judges said they would hand down verdicts in January.

Villepin has used the publicity of his trial to relaunch a sagging political career, hinting broadly that he might run for president against Sarkozy in 2012. He attributed the case against him to Sarkozy’s desire for revenge, saying the president had vowed to “hang me by a butcher’s hook, and the promise has been kept.’’

Sarkozy, who rose to prominence under Chirac, has not been ensnared by the various court proceedings, although he joined in bringing charges against Villepin.

But his government, as political heir of the leaders charged with malfeasance, seemed likely to end up tarred in some measure by the apparent confirmations of a long-anchored public perception that corruption is rife in France’s corridors of power.

Against that background, political figures from the left as well as the right questioned whether it was a wise idea to prosecute Chirac, 76, the first former or sitting president of France’s Fifth Republic to face such criminal charges.

Sarkozy declined to comment.

Segolene Royal, the Socialist candidate for president in 2007, said the former president had a right to peace and quiet in his retirement and suggested hauling him before a judge at this point “is not good for France’s image, even if he deserves it.’’

Xavier Bertrand, who heads Sarkozy’s Union for a Popular Movement, which descended from Chirac’s neo-Gaullist political party, said that “it is not useful to go back on things again and again.’’

After a long inquiry, investigating magistrate Xaviere Simeoni recommended a trial for Chirac and several aides on charges of misappropriating public funds and abusing public office while he was Paris mayor from 1977 to 1995.