Many jurisdictions treat celebrity criminals—that is to say, criminals who were once famous for something other than crime—with leniency and mansuetude, for fear, perhaps, of alarming elites. After all, there but for the grace of God go they . . .

France is especially good at leniency for celebrities. The rock star Bertrand Cantat served only four years in prison for the brutal murder, without a glimmer of an extenuating circumstance, of the actress Marie Trintignant, then his mistress. He went back to his wife after he emerged from prison, and she committed suicide a short time afterwards, having made a telephone call to her parents complaining of his erratic behavior. This is proof of nothing, of course, but nevertheless suspicious minds might wonder whether it was entirely a coincidence.

The famous Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser (1918–90), a professor at the elite École normale supérieure, strangled his wife, Hélène Rytmann, in 1980 and never afterwards suffered the indignity of even a single night in the cells, nor was he ever tried. On the contrary, he went straight to the hospital, where he was able to write his autobiography, L’Avenir dure longtemps (The Future Lasts a Long Time).

True enough, Althusser had been admitted to a psychiatric hospital in a state of madness many times before the murder, but it is unlikely that, but for his celebrity status and the support of famous pupils and acquaintances in the upper reaches of the intelligentsia, he