Sept. 29 (Bloomberg) -- Have you ever seen a pie-throwing contest in a French restaurant?

Well, pull up a chair. The spectacle now taking place in a gilt-ceiling, wood-panel courtroom in the Palais de Justice in Paris -- where Marie Antoinette was sentenced to the guillotine -- is an unedifying brawl, starring two prominent politicians slinging around some pretty nasty stuff.

One week into hearings on “l’affaire Clearstream,” and French President Nicolas Sarkozy and his nemesis, former Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, have lunged at each other and missed, besmirching themselves instead.

Together, they are succeeding in trashing the image of France’s political elite.

The actual case -- named after a Luxembourg-based financial clearing house, not a mineral water -- is a tangled tale of fake bank accounts, wild conspiracy theories and late-night meetings in over-decorated ministry offices. The details are baffling: Wait for the movie.

What matters is the courtroom drama, where de Villepin and four others face criminal charges of slander against Sarkozy and some 40 public figures, whose names mysteriously appeared on a fabricated list of suspect bank accounts. Sarkozy, meanwhile, has chosen to be a civil plaintiff in the case, which many consider a conflict of interest and worse, an abuse of power.

Waging a Vendetta

This face-off would be damaging enough. Now the two men have debased the proceedings by turning them into a staging area for their venomous feud. Somebody should stop them before they do any more damage.

On the first day of the trial, de Villepin, looking the part of a patrician head waiter, fired an opening shot, claiming to be a victim of Sarkozy’s “vindictiveness.” Two days later, Sarkozy -- picture him as the mad cook in the kitchen -- was on national television, noting that enough evidence had been found to bring the “guilty” parties to trial.

How tacky can you get: An ex-prime minister accusing the president of waging a vendetta through the courts, and a president -- a lawyer en plus -- declaring the ex-prime minister guilty before the trial is over. Now de Villepin is suing Sarkozy for violation of human rights.

This kind of behavior is hardly worthy of the political heirs of General Charles de Gaulle.

Most French people already regard their politicians as “pimps, or thugs in ties,” according to Laurent Dubois, a professor at the Paris-based Institute of Political Studies. “The Clearstream affair has just reinforced the notion that anything goes.”

Chippendale Try-Out

Here’s how low they can go. Not only has Sarkozy rushed to deliver his own verdict in the case: he has also decided on the sentence, threatening to hang those who tried to smear him by a “meat hook.” Meanwhile, a Sarkozy ally compared de Villepin to a male strip teaser trying out for a part in the Chippendales. So much for France’s reputation as the land of good manners and high culture.

Outside France, de Villepin is best remembered as the eloquent French foreign minister who gave an impassioned speech against the Iraq war at the United Nations in 2003. This made him a hero to much of the world; in the U.S., it made him a pompous example of “the cheese-eating surrender monkey,” the infamous caricature of anti-French hysteria.

Upstart Outsider

In those days, de Villepin -- a product of the elite “grandes ecoles,” author of a biography of Napoleon and four volumes of poetry -- was angling to succeed President Jacques Chirac, looking for ways to block the upstart outsider, Sarkozy.

The rivalry between the two men was already white-hot, long before the Clearstream case first made headlines in 2006. It is now a scary fight to the finish. Sarkozy suspects de Villepin of orchestrating the smear campaign against him; de Villepin accuses Sarkozy of using the judicial system to crush him.

The Clearstream story, with its ham-handed intrigues involving ex-spies, rogue geniuses and dirty money, is rotten enough. What makes it more unappetizing is the sight of two men, blinded by hatred, flinging political mud around a courtroom -- confirming everyone’s worst views about politicians.

(Celestine Bohlen is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.)

To contact the writer of this column: Celestine Bohlen in Paris at cbohlen1@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: September 28, 2009 18:00 EDT