In the story of Greece’s subjugation by European capital, there is a seemingly endless cast of villains. At the top of that list are Angela Merkel and the almost cartoonishly loathsome Wolfgang Schauble. Right below them, officials like Jeroen Dijsselbloem, president of the Eurogroup of finance ministers, a caricature of a grey-suited technocrat.

Yet of all the people who bear responsibility for forcing this latest Memorandum on the Greek people, few played as reprehensible a role as French President François Hollande. For months, Hollande has made noises about the need for a different approach to the European debt crisis. In the face of German intransigence, he consistently argued in public that Greece could not be allowed to leave the eurozone. At one point in late June, he even described Alexis Tsipras’s counter-proposals for a new bailout deal as “acceptable.”

But in the end, these words amounted to nothing. Hollande, the “good cop,” stood side-by-side with Merkel and other eurozone leaders, as they pushed Tsipras into accepting a “compromise” deal that imposed devastating terms on the already-ravaged Greek economy.