how does the withdrawal of the Legion of Honor take place?

“The Legion of Honor is not there to preach morality,” Emmanuel Macron said on Wednesday as a disciplinary procedure is opened to decide whether this decoration should be withdrawn from Gérard Depardieu. The actor is the target of two complaints for rape and sexual assault.

Reactions have multiplied since Emmanuel Macron’s remarks, made on the evening of Wednesday December 20, on Gérard Depardieu and the process of withdrawing the Legion of Honor from the actor. There Minister of Culture announced on December 15 the opening of a “disciplinary procedure” in order to decide whether Gérard Depardieu’s Legion of Honor should be withdrawn from him or not. The actor is notably accused of rape.

What are the procedures for withdrawing the Legion of Honor? What are the precedents?

Officially, on the Legion of Honor website, it is written in black and white that the decoration can be withdrawn in the event of “criminal conviction” and when the decorated person has committed “acts contrary to honor” or “likely to harm the interests of France”. There is a gradation of sanctions, that is to say that before the withdrawal, there may already be a “blame” and a little more serious, a “suspension” more or less limited in time.

To achieve a withdrawal, there is first an instruction, an investigation led by the Grand Chancellor of the Legion of Honor, General Lecointre, former Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces. The file is then entrusted to the council of the order of the Legion of Honor which issues an opinion and the sanction is taken by the Grand Master of the Legion of Honor, who is none other than the President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron. The decision is announced by decree and published in the Official Journal.

Despite everything, on the Official Journal website, it appears that this measure is anonymized. For example, on the page of the Official Journal of December 14, at the very top, we can see that a member of the Legion of Honor has been excluded but it is impossible to know who it is because access is protected, and impossible to guess because there are currently 79,000 decorated people.

Marshal Pétain, Claude Guéant, Lance Armstrong… deprived of decoration

The Legion of Honor has already been withdrawn from personalities, automatically and without debate, after a conviction for a crime or a sentence of more than a year in prison. This was the case for Philippe Pétain when he was sentenced to death in 1945, also for Maurice Papon in 1998. More recently, Claude Guéant, former Minister of the Interior under Nicolas Sarkozy, also lost his Legion of Honor since he was convicted in his ministry’s cash bonus affair.

Wednesday December 20, Emmanuel Macron said: “the Legion of Honor is not there to preach morality”. However, when the institution withdraws the decoration for acts “contrary to honor”, the question can settle down. The British John Galliano, former Dior stylist, notably had his decoration withdrawn for anti-Semitic comments filmed in the street. American cyclist Lance Armstrong was also concerned, convicted of doping for a good part of his career.