The curtain goes up on a tragi-comedy of revenge today with former spy chiefs, media bosses and a roll-call of the political elite set to lift the lid on a plot to destroy Nicolas Sarkozy as he ran for the presidency.

Dominique de Villepin, the last French Prime Minister, is standing trial accused of a bungled attempt to smear Mr Sarkozy and other stars of the political and business world.

The allegations boil down to attempted slander, but are more about the hatred between the pugilist President and Mr Villepin, the matinée idol of Jacques Chirac’s Government who tried to elbow him aside in the race to be France’s leader.

For a month, the Palais de Justice courtroom, where Marie-Antoinette was condemned to the guillotine in 1793, will offer a glimpse of skulduggery at the pinnacle of French power.

Mr Villepin, 55, a former diplomat and Chirac protégé, faces a €48,000 (£43,000) fine and five-year jail term. This would almost certainly be suspended even if he were convicted on all charges of “complicity in calumny, complicity in the use of forgeries, dealing in stolen property and breach of trust”.

At the heart of the case is the charge that Mr Villepin and four others tried in 2004 to link Mr Sarkozy to a list of accounts in Clearstream, a Luxembourg bank. At the time Mr Sarkozy was Interior Minister, manoeuvring to seize control of Mr Chirac’s Gaullist movement and win the presidency in 2007. Mr Villepin was Foreign Minister, before taking over as Interior Minister and then Prime Minister in 2005.

Mr Sarkozy — his identity thinly disguised — was among more than 100 people on the list, which turned out to be a forgery. The money was believed to have been tied to millions of pounds of bribes over the sale of French frigates to Taiwan. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the IMF, was also on the bogus list.

Mr Villepin denies wrongdoing but his version of events clashes with that of two of his co-accused, Jean-Louis Gergorin, a former vice-president of the aerospace company EADS, and Imad Lahoud, a computer expert. Mr Gergorin reported having meetings with Mr Villepin in 2004, which the former Prime Minister denies. Changing his story for the fourth time, Mr Lahoud said in a recent affidavit: “I knew that Jean-Louis Gergorin was in contact with Dominique de Villepin and that the conspiracy against Nicolas Sarkozy was planned with Dominique de Villepin’s knowledge.”

If Mr Sarkozy had not been so thirsty for revenge, however, it is unlikely that Clearstream would have become une affaire d’état. In 2005, when he heard that his name was on the list, he vowed to “hang whoever did this on a butcher’s hook”.

Mr Villepin argues that he was merely doing his job when he asked for checks to be carried out on the bank list, and says he dropped the matter when told it was a forgery. But the President’s ire intensified when Yves Bertrand, a former chief of police intelligence who followed the Clearstream affair — when he was not monitoring the romantic lives of ministers — said the trial was driven by Mr Sarkozy’s desire to get even. Mr Bertrand is appearing as a witness.

Mr Villepin’s lawyers will ask the judges to dismiss Mr Sarkozy as a plaintiff because of conflict of interest: as President, Mr Sarkozy is the chief justice and immune from legal action.The move is expected to fail, but Mr Villepin has scored a point. No President has ever taken legal action in office and Mr Villepin is trying to paint himself as a victim of a vendetta driven by obsession.

“Allowing oneself to be dominated by passion and hatred amounts to failure,” Mr Villepin said. “I have faith in his ability to screw things up.”

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