Jean-Marie Le Pen - Obituary
Jean-Marie Le Pen died at midday on the 7th of January, at the age of 96. This infamous Nazi sympathiser - who unsuccessfully ran for the French Presidency on five occasions, and who once spoke unashamedly of his use of torture as a second lieutenant stationed in colonial Algeria, played a critical role in the normalisation of the far-right in France. Half a century on from when Le Pen co-founded the ‘National Front’ alongside former SS soldiers, his party (now led by his youngest daughter, Marine) is now on the verge of power, under the sanitised name of the ‘National Rally.’
Le Pen’s near-70-year career in politics was characterised by a consuming hatred of all those who strayed from his ideal of the ‘true’ French citizen: communists, Jews, gay people, women who sought to be defined by something more than their reproductive capacities; the list goes on. He was fined on numerous occasions for hate speech, contesting crimes against humanity, and inciting racial violence, with his most notorious convictions being for Holocaust denial. Yet the hatred which motivated him above all others was that which he directed towards Muslim immigrants, especially those coming from France’s former colonies.
Born in Brittany in 1928, Jean-Marie Le Pen studied law at the Sorbonne, where he spent his spare time getting into scraps with the police and communists on the streets of Paris’s Latin Quarter. He later became involved with known antisemite Pierre Poujade’s ‘Union for the Defence of Tradesmen and Artisans’ (UCDA), a right-wing populist party which campaigned against increased taxes for shopkeepers and small business owners, and in 1956 became France’s youngest parliamentarian at the age of 27. After just six months in the role, however, he took leave of the National Assembly in order to enlist in the army, and ended up as a paratrooper during the Algerian War of Independence.
Reflecting, in 1962, on his involvement in the war, he told a newspaper: “I have nothing to hide. I tortured because it had to be done”. Le Pen’s repugnant confession (which he later attempted to retract despite consolidating evidence) would have helped him gain the favour of many on the French far-right, the leadership of which in part comprised of former members and supporters of the French paramilitary group ‘OAS’- infamous for carrying out a campaign of terror against Algerian civilians - for whom Le Pen was often considered to be excessively moderate.
Having left the UCDA (which, by that point, went by the name of ‘French Union and Fraternity’) in 1958, Le Pen spent the following 14 years working with and for a variety of extremist groups and campaigns, losing his seat in 1962. In 1972, he was chosen to front a new party, intended to unite the far-right, which was to be called the ‘National Front.’ For the remainder of the decade, the National Front would remain on the margins of politics, obtaining pitiful results in the legislative elections of 1973, the presidential election of 1974, and the municipal elections of 1977.
In 1983, however, Le Pen’s luck changed, when an unexpected victory in the municipal elections of a small commune, attributable to an unprecedented alliance with a more moderate right-wing party, propelled his party into the limelight, marking the beginning of the rehabilitation of the far-right in France.
The National Front ran on a platform which combined a fervent anti-communism with a vitriolic opposition to immigration. As one journalist put it, the party “reject[ed] the idea of ‘class struggle’ in order to substitute it for a struggle between ‘races’”. ‘Immigrants’ (a term which was implicitly understood to refer to people of colour) were blamed for unemployment and the economic crisis which had blighted the country since the Oil Shock of 1973 and accused of undermining the cultural integrity of the French nation itself.
Wishing to rid himself of the disgrace which had hung over far-right politicians in the post-war period, Le Pen presented himself not only as an ‘outsider’ but as a representative of an entirely new political tradition. His ardent defence of the French Empire, and accompanying dehumanisation of those who hailed from France’s former colonies, allowed this apologist for the Vichy regime to pass himself off as a patriot; at the same time his anti-communist tirades, which would make him so precious to TV producers for the viewership they brought, united all corners of the right.
In 1984, the National Front obtained 11% of the vote in the European Elections, and Le Pen himself became an MEP. In 1986, Le Pen entered the National Assembly as an MP for the first time in 24 years, accompanied by 34 other newly elected National Front representatives. Fast-forward to 2002, and Le Pen found himself in a face-off against Chirac for the French Presidency. This marked the first time a far-right candidate had received sufficient support to qualify for the second round of the French Presidential elections, and, by extension, the closest the far-right had been to power in France since 1945.
Although Le Pen was thoroughly defeated in the second round and never achieved the same success again, by this point he had succeeded in profoundly transforming the French political landscape. His influence touched not only the electorate but other parties, with Chirac himself adopting some hardline anti-immigration talking points with the express intention of winning the trust of those who had been inclined to vote for the National Front.
Today, the influence exerted by the far-right over other political parties has only grown. National Rally received almost a third of the votes in the second round of the legislative elections last year, making Marine Le Pen the de facto kingmaker in the hung parliament, with the power to decide the fate of any Prime Minister put forward by President Macron. Her support having grown since 2022, she stands a serious chance of winning the Presidential elections in 2027.
Whilst Marine Le Pen has gone to great lengths to clean up the image of her party since being appointed its leader in 2011 - much to the dismay of her father, whom she later expelled from the party after his repetition of the claim that the gas chambers were a mere “detail of history” provoked scandal - beneath the surface, not much has truly changed. Jean-Marie’s expressions of virulent antisemitism (a prejudice which remains fairly widespread at the grassroots level of the party) are seen by many prominent members of the National Rally as having constituted a strategic miscalculation on his part, as opposed to a moral failing. The same goes for his sexism and homophobia, whilst the party’s anti-immigration and Islamophobic rhetoric remain as central as ever to its politics.
In a statement to AFP, Le Pen’s family affirmed that the nonagenarian, who had been in a care home for several weeks, passed away “surrounded by his loved ones.” A markedly different death to that of Ahmed Moulay, first tortured then executed in front of his wife and six children by a band of French paratroopers, one of whom would leave behind him a dagger bearing a name and a regiment: ‘J.M. Le Pen, 1er R.E.P.’. Over the course of his life, Jean-Marie Le Pen brought pain and suffering to countless people. He will continue to do so after his death.
Image: Flickr/Blandine Le Cain
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