Jean-Marie Le Pen, post-war leader of the French far-right, dies at 96

JeanJean-Marie Le Pen, founder of France’s far-right Front National party (renamed as the Rassemblement National in 2018), died on Tuesday at the age of 96 following his recent hospitalization in the Paris suburb of Garches.

His death coincided with a day of commemorations to mark the tenth year since the January 7th 2015 terrorist attacks against the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, in which 12 people lost their lives, including the cartoonists Cabu, Charb and Tignous who never held back from manifesting their hatred of the man who was both the driving force and the face of the revival of the French far-right following WWII.

Le Pen’s death was announced as his daughter Marine Le Pen, figurehead of the Rassemblement National and leader of its parliamentary group, was winding up her visit to France’s Indian Ocean territory of Mayotte. There, her recurrent, insistent calls for a crackdown on immigration – echoed by the new French government – have been largely welcomed by the local population, in a context of major tensions over the arrival of large numbers of migrants from the nearby Comoro Islands.

Throughout his long political career, Jean-Marie Le Pen was regularly and publicly outspoken with racist and anti-Semitic comments and jibes, while also minimising Nazi crimes and praising colonialism. These resulted in a number of convictions for hate speech. Here, French historian Nicolas Lebourg, a specialist researcher and writer on the French and European far-right, looks back on the marking moments of Le Pen’s life.

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His epitaph could be one of his favourite sayings – “I am the most hated man in France”. It was not a boast. In a society with very rightwing representations, it is perhaps a delicate matter for the younger population to understand to what degree Jean-Marie Le Pen was a divisive figure, he who the French historian Grégoire Kauffmann gave the nickname “Devil of the [French] republic”.

Those who hated him and those who adulated him could agree on one thing: the Caesarist demonstrated that even with institutions as centralised as those of France’s Fifth Republic, it was possible to change France without governing it. The life of Le Pen reads of course like a novel, but it is also one that is extremely revealing about French society. He was a singular stimulator of the country’s far-right sympathies.

His first and most enduring political passion was the hatred of Gaullism, the conservative political movement formed around the person of Charles de Gaulle. That would not prevent him from calling for a “yes” vote in the 1962 referendum on the introduction, championed by de Gaulle, of presidential elections by universal suffrage, as opposed to an electoral college. The issue was therefore not that of the institutions, which were nevertheless central to Gaullist thinking, but rather the idea that the general had represented the insurrection against Marshal Philippe Pétain, the head of the collaborationist WWII Vichy regime.

At the heart of that was the idea that the notion of Gaullist national unity was in reality but a cause of division, because it did not correspond with the conception of the nation that was so dear to the far-right, and which Le Pen hammered out in his best-selling autobiographic account Mémoires (he never published a work of doctrine).

He took his revenge, relative to the country’s institutions, by succeeding in provoking alternatives in an electoral system designed to ensure stability. Le Pen went after those who claimed adherence to de Gaulle’s political camp.

A huge ego

In a book of conversations with Robert Ménard, the maverick hard-right mayor of Béziers, and which was finally never published, Le Pen claimed that Jacques Chirac, leader of the Gaullist RPR party, refused an alliance with him because Chirac discovered, shortly before the 1988 presidential election, that he had Jewish ancestry.

Le Pen, who initially had no animosity towards Israel, became hostile towards the Jewish state not for ideological reasons but because he imagined that a Jewish plot against him explained the objections of the Israeli authorities to him visiting their country. While the basic conceptions of the far-right shaped Le Pen’s vision of the world, they were articulated according to his immense ego.

That ego was formed out of various factors, one of which was the belief that he had lived through and known everything – except, sufficiently, his father, who died when he was 14. Le Pen talked a great deal about the Algerian War of Independence, in which he served in the French army, but was largely silent about his experiences as a parachutist in the First Indochina War, and one can only speculate that perhaps there lies a hidden key to understanding the man.

Le Pen regarded his life as an adventure in which he was the hero. He felt he was culturally superior to many other political figures, which was largely true, but this was founded mostly on what he learnt in his early years. It was a traditional cultural education, which impressed the crowd with his phrases in Latin, but one which voluntarily excluded anything about human and social sciences.

Le Pen’s ambition was more measured than the extent of his self-admiration. According to his former close colleague Roland Gaucher, with whom the Front National founder had a complex relationship, Le Pen had dreamt of becoming Chirac’s defence minister both when the latter became prime minister in 1986, and when he reached the final round of the 1988 presidential elections (which he would lose to the incumbent François Mitterrand). But it would appear that he never seriously saw himself as one day becoming French president.

Jean-Marie Le Pen had what could be described as a Dracula complex: relishing the times he was declared politically dead and buried, only to emerge from the wilderness stronger than ever, ready to terrify those in the public spotlight. When no one wants to associate with you publicly but everyone in elite circles wants to meet you privately, the only option left is to revel in being the “Republic's devil”.

Le Pen always insisted it was better to lose with his own ideas than to win with someone else’s, often adding one of his favourite phrases, that he possessed “extreme integrity”. After numerous small-scale political ventures, he attached his name to the party with which he would become synonymous for decades: the Front National (FN).

One has to understand the political purgatory from which Jean-Marie Le Pen rescued the far-right. After the Liberation of France towards the end of WWII, not only were most far-right movements banned, but the crime of “national unworthiness” – an offence created in France in 1944 – could even be invoked against someone who promoted “racism”. Although elected the youngest Member of Parliament (MP) in France in 1956, Le Pen watched his political camp plunge back into insignificance: together, the various far-right candidate lists garnered just 0.92% of the vote in the 1967 parliamentary elections.

Le Pen had convinced himself, and many others, that he alone deserved credit for founding the FN in 1972, modelling it on earlier political groupings bearing the same 'Front National' name that he had led during the Algerian War. He claimed to have been the sole voice attacking immigration, and that he had rallied together scattered nationalist forces and implanted them in public life. None of this was true.

It was the neo-fascists of Ordre Nouveau (ON) or 'New Order', who founded the FN and who approached Le Pen to serve as one of its three co-presidents. In the party’s early weeks, when Le Pen tried to outmanoeuvre them, ON dispatched François Brigneau, a former wartime collaborator, with a directive stating that he, Brigneau, would take over as FN president if Le Pen refused to compromise.

It was then his right-hand man, former collaborator Victor Barthélemy, who shaped the propaganda of the FN to make it the “party of Jean-Marie Le Pen”. Initially, Le Pen did not believe in the theme of immigration, which was almost imposed upon him by his subsequent number two, François Duprat. He only managed to unite his political family gradually, particularly after the early victories in the town of Dreux, 50 miles west of Paris, achieved in 1983 by Jean-Pierre Stirbois, who had become his deputy.

The electorate that subsequently secured Jean-Marie Le Pen’s place on the electoral stage during the 1984 European polls was far from being composed of ordinary people concerned by immigration: some of the best results were in areas such as the well-heeled Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine and the capital's 16th arrondissement (district).

The orator and his electorate

But it was indeed Le Pen who succeeded, for the first time in French political history, not only in unifying the far-right but also in achieving electoral success for it. Until the split with his deputy Bruno Mégret at the end of 1998, he remained the arbitrator and centre of gravity for of all the party's factions – the split itself being largely due to the perception that the FN president was only interested in focusing on presidential campaigns, at the expense of seeking to win other elections. Yet he was such a driving force in garnering votes that, in the elections of 1988 and 1989, FN-affiliated lists ran under the name “LEPEN”, an acronym for “Liste entente populaire et nationale” (or the 'Popular and National Accord List').

However, the cult of Le Pen's personality is misunderstood. When he campaigned in the late 1980s with pyramid-shaped stages and entrances accompanied by torchbearers, accusations of fascism were inevitable – and there is no doubt that the effect was intentional, both in its appeal and its provocation. Nevertheless, commentators continued to describe FN support as a “protest vote”. Yet the reality he created was in fact far more nuanced.

In 1984, 49% of FN voters in the European elections chose the party because of Le Pen; by the 1995 presidential election, this figure had dropped to 18%, with 60% instead voting primarily for his manifesto. By way of comparison, 46% of the electorate of the then prime minister Édouard Balladur supported him based on his personality, and 39% because of his manifesto.

Objectively, this therefore demonstrates that Le Pen’s voters were the most committed to the FN’s project. To dismiss them as mere protest voters or followers of a charismatic leader is overly simplistic. Similarly, Marine Le Pen, heralded for years as bringing credibility to the FN, performs worse than her father among graduates and intellectual professions. The younger generation of political activists who sought to capitalise on the FN between 2011 and the removal of party vice-president Florian Philippot  in 2017 – and who disparaged Jean-Marie Le Pen as damaging the party’s credibility –  thus thoroughly deserved the former Poujadist MP's scorn.

Yet his political skill was not that of a visionary – the very quality that, even at the height of their estrangement, his daughter publicly highlighted in order to emphasise that the FN had been ahead of its time on the migration issue. The man who loved to repeat “I was right all along” and portray himself as a seer was in fact consistently wrong in his electoral predictions. He would simply revise his prophecy after the fact, and the countless naïve individuals working in political head offices and newsrooms would then marvel at his supposed foresight.

What is 'Le Penism'?

If Le Penism endured, it was because it posessed multiple dimensions. 

Nothing could be further from the truth than the Le Penist slogan: “He says out loud what you’re thinking privately.” In fact, Le Pen positioned himself one step ahead. His racist provocations created such a media frenzy that those who believed immigration was a problem could comfort themselves that, ideologically, they were not as extreme – yet still felt legitimised in their protests. Through his controversial outbursts, Le Pen became a kind of political midwife for his voters, helping them give voice to their rejection of the other and their break with the prevailing political and cultural system.

To the electorate, he offered an unexpected way of using the country's political institutions, with the FN functioning as a “lobbying party”. There was no need to put these adventurers into power (in the 1990s, up to 75% of respondents believed this would be a danger to democracy). Because the far-right effectively became a minority group that was capable of blocking decisions, every parliamentary majority found itself defeated. Each successive government then rushed to pass new laws on immigration and security; this allowed voters to achieve the legislative changes they desired without the inconvenience of having the extremists actually in power. This process ultimately produced political figures such as Manuel Valls – a prime minister under socialist president François Hollande and hard-right politician Laurent Wauquiez –  signalling the end of leftwing or rightwing governments that ruled out of conviction. 

And then, confusion reigned ... and now, the far-right stands on the threshold of power.

To break the political system, Jean-Marie Le Pen did not need to produce a doctrine. He genuinely aligned with a national-populist current which had first emerged in the 1880s as a reaction to France’s loss of Alsace-Lorraine in the north-east of the country following the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. Le Pen was able to channel anxieties about transnationalisation and postmodernity into this framework, stimulating as a response the idea of France as a unitary culture.

Nostalgia has a future.

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

English version by Michael Streeter and Graham Tearse