Looks like France has been presumed guilty without evidence, despite having signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and having on statute, since 1789, that men are innocent "until evidence comes forward to prove otherwise". Don't know what it said about women, though (probably nothing).

Certainly, I have no problem with how I was treated when arrested by the French dibble, but then I'm a bloke.

There are anomalies, like everywhere. The prosecutors sit higher than the defending barristers due to a "carpenter's error", but in Britain in the eighteenth century "The hungry judges soon the sentence sign, and wretches hang that jurymen may dine".

Curiously enough, an article in an American academic law journal noted that the principle expressed in the French 1789 statute has still to be formally recognised in Anglo-American jurisprudence.