How Jean-Marie Le Pen's surprise final will is tearing his family apart

BeforeBefore his death on January 7th 2025, Jean-Marie Le Pen dropped a small bombshell on his three daughters. This was in the form of a surprise, one-page will, written in an unsteady hand in blue ink a year and a half earlier, on August 5th 2023. In it, the founder of the far-right Front National (FN) – now called Rassemblement National (RN) - declared that he was “bequeathing ” to his wife Jeannine, known as Jany, the “usufruct [editor's note, use of] of the remainder of my estate … in addition to what she is entitled to as a surviving spouse”. He wrote: “These are my final wishes.”

Marine Le Pen discovered the existence of the document when she visited the notary on January 17th, the day after the memorial service for her father at Val-de-Grâce in Paris. She immediately cancelled the meeting that had been planned with Jany Le Pen and her two sisters in the wealthy western Paris suburb of Saint-Cloud.

The will, which “cancels all previous arrangements”, gives Jany Le Pen the right of usufruct for his former property in Saint-Cloud's well-heeled Montretout area. This means that while she may not be the sole owner of the property, she can live there.

Jany Le Pen also wants to have all or part of the former far-right leader's liquid assets. The previous will, written in March 2023, made no special provision for his partner.

“I ask my three daughters to respect my wish to protect Jany, who has stood by and supported me for more than 32 years, as they are not wronged by the usufruct, which will end on her death,” Jean-Marie Le Pen added in this final will (see above).

The document, handed to a Paris notary on September 19th 2023 and lodged in the central registry of wills, has triggered intense negotiations between Jany Le Pen’s lawyer, Frédéric Joachim, and the three Le Pen daughters.

The usufruct provision has clear consequences for the inheritance of Marine Le Pen and her two sisters, Marie-Caroline and Yann. It prevents them from selling the Montretout residence, which stands high above Saint-Cloud, without their stepmother’s consent. The house was 75% owned by Jean-Marie Le Pen and 25% by Marine and Yann Le Pen after a gift made by their father in 2012 (a gift not extended to the eldest, Marie-Caroline, who was estranged from the family at the time after leaving the FN).

But selling this manor, which Le Pen himself inherited in 1976, after the death of Hubert Lambert, owner of the Lambert cement works, is a priority for the daughters. For years, the main house - where the FN founder kept his offices - has been neither lived in nor looked after. Only Marine Le Pen’s mother, Pierrette, and her sister Yann still live in the outbuildings.

The estate, which has never been refurbished since it was bought, would be too costly to maintain, while its sale could fetch a large sum. According to Le Point weekly news magazine, the house was already being offered off market for around 10 million euros, even before Jean-Marie Le Pen’s death.

Ongoing negotiations

Mediapart has pieced together a series of documents and accounts showing how the battle over the inheritance has been playing out behind the scenes for the past two years. According to our information, negotiations have been under way in recent months between the heirs, with the aim of reaching a settlement between the three Le Pen daughters and their father's widow.

Contacted by Mediapart, Marine, Yann and Jany Le Pen did not respond. Frédéric Joachim, lawyer for Jean-Marie Le Pen’s widow, declined to comment on an “ongoing matter” that “concerns things as private as this”. “One of the points of the settlement is that it’s covered by confidentiality so it’s not something to talk about in the press,” he told us. “For a protocol, for the amicable resolution of a case, to be effective it obviously has to remain private,” he added, while conceding that “journalistic research into the subject is to an extent fair”.

According to those close to Jany Le Pen, the daughters of the former far-right leader are hoping their stepmother will waive her rights to the estate. But Jany Le Pen is not ready to give up the usufruct left to her by her husband - who owned 75% of the company that owns the property - unless she receives a generous payment and her share of the remaining money in her husband’s bank accounts. At the beginning of the talks, she asked for a total of one million euros, but Marine and Yann Le Pen did not appear willing to go beyond a third of that amount.

Selling the Montretout house could make it easier for Marine Le Pen to cover the costs and fines of the various legal and tax cases opened against her and her father in recent years. In the trial concerning the employment of European Parliament assistants, the former president of Rassemblement National (RN) was fined 100,000 euros in March; she has lodged an appeal.

At the same time, the European Parliament has begun proceedings to recover 181,000 euros over “possible irregularities” in her use of public funds while serving as an MEP in Strasbourg between 2004 and 2017. This follows an earlier demand to repay 330,000 euros in 2023. The clawing back of 303,000 euros from her father for the same reasons has been halted by his death, but according to Mediapart's information the European Parliament has informed the notary handling the estate of this debt. Both father and daughter have contested these claims and the European Court of Justice is due to rule soon on the challenge brought by Jean-Marie Le Pen’s legal team.

Then there are the tax investigations into Jean-Marie and Marine Le Pen, who have been accused by the tax authorities of undervaluing jointly-owned property. And when a person receives an inheritance, they also accept responsibility for the debts of the deceased as well as their assets.

Marine Le Pen has nonetheless been able to rely on substantial new funds. She was named sole heir to the estate of a supporter in Cannes who died in October 2023, receiving an apartment worth 1.09 million euros, as revealed by Le Monde.
In 2023, and with their father’s consent, Marine and her sister Yann also managed to sell a villa in Rueil-Malmaison in the Paris suburbs: a fine house with 300 square metres of living space, plus 1,600 square metres of garden, an outbuilding and a pool, where Jean-Marie and Jany Le Pen had lived since their marriage in 1991.

'Bonbonnière', as the house is called, was bought for 2.5 million euros by businessman François Durvye, an adviser to Marine Le Pen, and his ultra-conservative backer Pierre-Édouard Stérin. The sale price, seven times higher than the 2012 valuation, raised eyebrows, given the buyer’s role in funding hard-right networks.

By the summer of 2023, Marine and Yann Le Pen were pointing to their father’s declining faculties to justify stepping in to manage his outgoings and estate. In June 2023, the two sisters were granted power of attorney by Jean-Marie Le Pen to manage his affairs: taxes, business dealings, insurance, correspondence, deposits, loans, sales, purchases, inheritance, and the hiring of domestic staff, according to the document signed on June 15th 2023 and seen by Mediapart. Such a power of attorney is not a form of guardianship. Jean-Marie Le Pen was therefore free to change his will a few months later.

This power of attorney, however, allowed them to prepare the inheritance and took some daily control away from the Le Pen couple. On March 29th 2024, Jean-Marie Le Pen wrote to the bank Société Générale complaining tthat for “several months” he had no longer had “any way of making a payment” from his account, into which his pensions were paid, and that he was not even “informed of the transactions on my account”. He formally demanded that his banker send him a cheque book and 12 months’ worth of account statements.

Jany Le Pen, meanwhile, is said to have complained to those close to her about staff being let go, such as the gardener. She had witnessed a string of visits from the Le Pen daughters and their notary and felt she was being shut out of talks over selling a villa that had originally belonged to her. Friends of the couple had advised them that they needed to do more to help Jany, feeling that her husband’s earlier will did not protect her.

In August 2023, the couple each drew up a new will to “protect whoever of us is left alive”. According to the document seen by Mediapart, Jany Le Pen left Jean-Marie Le Pen a “quarter of my estate in full ownership, with the remaining three quarters as usufruct”.

Old grievances over the family fortune

This inheritance dispute also risks dredging up old quarrels over the Le Pen family wealth. In January, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s long-time confidant Gérald Gérin was convicted of hiding from the tax authorities a trust based in the British Virgin Islands between 2008 and 2015, which held 2.2 million euros, mainly in gold bars. The court suspected the butler of acting as a frontman for Jean-Marie Le Pen, though they were not able to prove this.

Since the Lambert inheritance in 1976, the full scope of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s fortune has been the subject of countless journalistic investigations. After their divorce in 1987, his ex-wife Pierrette Le Pen (née Lalanne) told the press that part of the inheritance (40 million francs - around 6 million euros) had been hidden in Switzerland. The regular trips to Switzerland by Jean-Marie Le Pen and his butler also fed suspicions of undeclared wealth.

In 2015, the French state's anti-money-laundering unit TRACFIN made an important discovery when looking into the early years of Gérald Gérin’s trust. In 2004, it was from Lombard Odier Darier Hentsch & Cie (LODH) bank that money was paid into this trust, the same bank that, according to past statements by Pierrette Le Pen, had received the Swiss funds from the Lambert inheritance. TRACFIN also found records of a bank account once held at Crédit Suisse bank by Jany Le Pen, which she closed in 2008, transferring 200,000 euros to her French account.

There is no doubt that in sorting out Jean-Marie Le Pen’s estate, all the cash assets he had will be closely scrutinised by those involved.

In 2016, there were several fiery exchanges between Jean-Marie Le Pen and his youngest daughter Yann over the influence of Gérald Gérin, who at the time was an authorised signatory on his bank accounts and who remained very close to the FN founder. There was even a theory then that this loyal aide might be a beneficiary of Le Pen's will.

When one of the current writers was working on a book about the FN's finances at the time and asked about these family tensions, the far-right leader quipped: “That’s part of family life, which is more or less friendly depending on the atmosphere, the temperature, the weather.” He added: “So long as I live, I do as I please with my goods. […] I don't know what will be left of my estate by the time I go.” Almost ten years on, Gérald Gérin is out of the picture, having fallen out with the family. But other family feuds remain. “It’ll all end the usual way, with everyone in court,” predicted a close acquaintance of the family a few years ago.

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• The original French version of this article can be found here.

English version by Michael Streeter