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Jean-Marie Le Pen: Life and Death of a Nazi

John Mullen

Jean Marie Le Pen, the most influential French fascist leader since World War II, died on Tuesday 7 January. The same evening, crowds of mostly young people gathered in Paris, Lyon and Marseille to celebrate, to chants of ‘Bonne Année et Bonne Santé: Jean-Marie est décédé!’ (Have a good year! Good health to you! Jean-Marie has passed away!). Extremist Interior Minister, Bruno Retailleau, immediately denounced the jubilation as ‘shameful’. Meanwhile, the press are publishing collections of Le Pen’s family photos, and President Macron officially expressed his condolences to the Le Pen family. Prime Minister François Bayrou paid homage to his being a ‘fighter’, while recognising fundamental disagreements with him. And Jordan Bardella, chair of the fascist National Rally organisation declared that Jean-Marie Le Pen ‘always served France, and defended her identity and sovereignty.’

On the radical Left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon of La France Insoumise wrote, ‘The combat against this man is over. The fight goes on against the hate, racism, islamophobia and antisemitism which he spread.’ The Communist daily paper L’Humanité has on its front page of 8 January the banner headline ‘Hate Was His Trade’ with a photograph of a German-made army knife engraved with Le Pen’s name, the knife which was recovered from where he had left it, in a house where activist Ahmed Moulay was tortured and murdered during the Algerian War in 1957. Manon Aubry, a France Insoumise Euro MP, spoke yesterday of the death of a ‘notorious racist and antisemite’, while Philippe Poutou, leading member of the New Anticapitalist Party, rejoiced at ‘this good news. The death of a racist, a colonialist, a fascist, a torturer, a murderer and a homophobe’.

A lifelong Nazi

Jean-Marie Le Pen turned to fascism young. At university in Paris in the late 1940s, he sold the newspaper of the far-right monarchists of Action Française, a publication which was edited by Xavier Vallat, who had been ‘Commissioner in charge of Jewish Affairs’ under the Vichy government. Le Pen was first elected MP for the Poujadist far-right movement when he was 27, in the 1950s. In the early 1960s, when the war against Algeria was tearing France apart, he was in the army, fighting against Algerian independence, involved in particular in torturing prisoners, and he will always claim that colonisation was a positive thing. He will never forgive De Gaulle for having finally accepted Algerian independence.

In the 1960s, isolated politically, he nevertheless worked at maintaining the fascist tradition, setting up a company recording and releasing far-right speeches and songs. One record, of songs and speeches of the Third Reich, explained on its cover, ‘These are the songs of the German Revolution … Adolf Hitler’s rise to power and that of the National Socialist Party were characterised by a powerful movement of the masses, popular and democratic, which triumphed following regular electoral consultations, circumstances which are generally forgotten.’

In the 1970s, Jean-Marie Le Pen succeeded in piecing together the divided far-right remnants to found the National Front, which decided to make a series of key tactical changes. Its Nazi core was to be hidden, and election campaigns, not street-fighting, were to be the priority. Expressing anti-Semitism was shelved, and anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia became almost the only focus. Finally, traditional racism based on fake theories of biological hierarchy was left behind, the new discourse being based on ‘incompatible’ cultures and the ‘war between civilizations’. The National Front was formed at a time when deep economic crisis was returning to Western Europe, and with it increasing pressure on the ruling class to turn popular anger against scapegoats.

Le Pen will remain a Nazi all his life. In 2010, at the age of 81, he declared in a seminar with student journalists, ‘In National Socialism, there is socialism. There was a considerable socialist content that transformed German society far more than any other political force had done.’ And, just last September, at 96 years of age, he was filmed singing, in his home, with an invited neo-Nazi rock band, ‘Match Retour’ (Return Match), whose name refers to their hope of a second chance to impose Nazism in Europe.

Tactical changes

Le Pen led the National Front in France from 1972 to 2011. Talk shows could get record audiences by inviting him as a guest, and complacent interviews became common. Le Pen made the most of them. He declared notably that the existence of the gas ovens used to massacre Jews and others was ‘a detail of Second World War history’. Informed that one Jewish singer, Patrick Bruel, had joined others in protesting against the FN, he commented about there being ‘a whole ovenfull’ of his opponents soon. The media loved these incidents, which they referred to as ‘slips’, but which were really carefully thought-out interventions aimed at strengthening the hard-line fascist core of the FN. Once he had a fairly large number of people who supported him on other questions, he would launch these anti-Semitic provocations. These were widely denounced, and the softer Le Pen supporters were challenged to move further into Nazi politics.

For many years, the National Front built itself up slowly, helped by three important factors: firstly the massive discredit of traditional left parties of government who were turning to neoliberalism and showing time after time that they had extremely little to offer ordinary people, secondly the very limited understanding on the radical left of the importance of stopping fascist parties by mass campaigns, including direct action to prevent their activities, and, thirdly, the historic weakness of the vast majority of the French Left concerning the fight against Islamophobia, the form of racism which was gradually becoming the centre of reaction in France.

The Front National tried hard to keep its core of hardline Nazis a secret. But in 1987, investigative journalist Anne Tristan infiltrated a branch of the FN, and noted how the hardliners talked: ‘Look, if you kill an Arab when Le Pen gets 0.5% of the vote, you get an outcry immediately, and you get called a racist’ said one activist, ‘When Le Pen’s at 15%, people make less fuss. So we need to keep on, and, you’ll see, when we’re at 30%, people will stop yelling.’

Fascist breakthrough

On 21 April 2002, Le Pen caused the biggest political earthquake of the last forty years in France by getting through to the second round run-off of the presidential elections. Tens of thousands protested all night in cities around France. Ten days later on 1 May, well over a million demonstrated against the fascists. Le Pen was easily defeated in the second round of the elections polling just under 18%. Five and a half million voted for him. But this was a breakthrough which accelerated the rise in the fascists’ popularity and respectability. In 2017, ten and a half million voted for them, and in 2022, thirteen million.

Since Marine Le Pen, the daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, became president of the Front National in 2011, a determined and generally successful campaign of ‘image detoxification’ has taken place. Nazi links were to be more comprehensively hidden, even organising street demonstrations was to be avoided. She expelled her father from the organisation (since he would not give up his sarcastic anti-Semitism), threw out some other open Nazis, instructed MPs to concentrate on respectability, and was eventually to be seen on pro-Israel ‘marches against antisemitism’ in 2023. Marine Le Pen’s femininity was also used to reassure voters that the old fascist values, generally associated with virility, were no longer at the centre of the RN’s politics.

This week, Marine Le Pen’s worry is to organise a funeral for her father which does not give space for the open Nazis who adored him to show themselves in public, so as not to threaten the fragile respectability her party, renamed National Rally, has so successfully built up. She has chosen a family funeral after a Catholic mass in the Breton town he was born in. This will probably be followed, though, by a disgusting ‘homage’ ceremony in Paris, which must be opposed.

Le Pen’s death is the time to re-explain and remobilise people against the fascist National Rally, which, preferred by Macron to the radical Left, is closer to government than it ever was when led by Jean-Marie Le Pen.

(John Mullen is a lifelong revolutionary socialist living in the Paris area and is a supporter of the France Insoumise. Courtesy: Counterfire, a British socialist organisation that also runs a website.)

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Jean-Marie Le Pen Legacy: Mainstreaming the Far-Right in France

Aurelien Mondon

The death of Jean-Marie Le Pen, former leader of the party once known as the National Front, occurs at a time when the mainstreaming of far-right politics in France seems almost complete.

Le Pen was, for most of his career, considered the devil in French politics. Yet today, his party, headed by his daughter and now called National Rally (Rassemblement National), is at the gates of power.

Le Pen became an MP in France’s national parliament in 1956, when he was just 27. He quickly became the face of the extreme right. After leaving for Algeria to fight against independence and being accused of torture during his military service there, Le Pen returned to French politics in the 1960s.

This was a time of social progress – and therefore a nadir for far-right politics.

In 1972, Le Pen was part of the group that created the National Front – essentially an attempt to unite various small extreme right organisations under one banner. He became the party’s first president as he was considered the least extreme of the contenders.

This was despite his having been found guilty of war crime apologia in 1971 for republishing a vinyl record of Nazi songs. Le Pen also routinely demonstrated a nostalgic attachment to the Nazi-collaborating Vichy regime of second-world-war France.

Racism was always at the core of Le Pen’s politics. However, as his party sought mainstream acceptance, the core became thinly concealed under veneers of anti-immigration concerns, patriotic pride or even pretence of defending women and France’s system of laïcité (secularism) against Islam.

The beginnings of the National Front were slow and the party struggled to be noticed until the mid-1980s. Its first national breakthrough was greatly aided by Socialist president François Mitterrand, who had been elected in 1981 on a radical platform but quickly turned to austerity to respond to a developing financial crisis.

Mitterrand’s approval ratings took a tumble as a result and, to stem the resurgence of the more moderate right, he actively and consciously helped Le Pen’s then-struggling party. With a view to splitting the vote on the right, Mitterand lent legitimacy to Le Pen’s extreme ideas by giving him a platform on public national media in particular. Most cynical of all, Mitterand changed the electoral system to a proportional one, which gave the National Front 35 MPs and a huge boost in visibility.

2002: Le Pen in the second round

Yet the real shock was to come in 2002 when Le Pen reached the second round of the presidential election. Here again though, this said far more about the state of French politics and democracy than it did of the so-called “irresistible rise” of the National Front.

Le Pen’s actual vote had been stagnant since 1988. Although the Le Pen vote appeared to increase by 2.5% between 1988 and 2002, when turnout is taken into account, his share of the vote increased only by 0.19% – or less than 500,000 votes. This is certainly not negligible but far from the perceived “tidal wave”.

Instead, it was the growing unpopularity of the status quo and the major governing parties which paved the way for the earthquake. In 2002, the major centrist parties on the left and right collectively received fewer votes than the abstention rate.

Likewise, perspective is also needed on the 2007 election, which has always been depicted as Le Pen’s downfall and the triumph of the mainstream over the extremists. In reality, Nicolas Sarkozy had siphoned a significant portion of the far-right vote by openly positioning himself as direct competition to Le Pen. Sarkozy’s constant attacks against immigration and Islam earned him the nickname “Nicolas Le Pen” in the Wall Street Journal.

As Marine Le Pen, Jean-Marie’s daughter and – at the time – campaign director, said on the night of the first round when asked how bad a defeat this was: “This is the victory of his ideas!”

So while Jean-Marie Le Pen was seeking to render his politics more palatable by moving away from his most incendiary discourse, the mainstream parties were helping his cause by taking an ambivalent attitude towards his messaging in order to win back his voters. Le Pen also provided a welcome diversion away from the crises mainstream parties proved unable to address.

This situation continued to worsen as Marine Le Pen replaced her father as party leader in 2011. She eventually changed the name of the party to National Rally and evicted him in 2015 when she could no longer defend his comments about gas chambers being a mere “detail” of the second world war.

But by then Sarkozy had mainstreamed much of the FN’s discourse. The election of Socialist François Hollande as president did nothing to turn the tide in 2012 as he also tried to act “tough” on the far right’s pet issues, including immigration and Islam in response to a deadly wave of terrorist attacks.

Arguably no president, however, has proven as zealous as Emmanuel Macron in his attempts to defeat the far right by absorbing its discourse, while claiming to be a bulwark against it. In 2020, he appointed an interior minister who accused Le Pen of being “too soft on Islam”. This marked a new low – the mainstream was outbidding rather than mimicking Le Pen.

2024: a dynasty at the gates of power

Meanwhile, Marine Le Pen has benefited not only from the mainstream’s pandering to her own politics but the hype around her rival on the far right, Eric Zemmour, during the 2022 presidential election campaign. The heightened attention devoted to Zemmour effectively obscured the genuine threat posed by Le Pen and her far-right ideology, which, by comparison, appeared almost moderate and reasonable.

Now, Le Pen, despite being embroiled in a damaging trial, appears the de facto kingmaker, supplying the votes Macron’s government needs to survive in a fractured parliament.

The death of Jean-Marie Le Pen occurs therefore at a time when French politics is facing one of its worst crisis. Far from being a bulwark against the far right, Macron has paved the way for the National Rally by mainstreaming its discourse and politics.

As much of the mainstream elites seem to have accepted that the rise of the far right is irresistible, the only choice left is whether it will be the far right or mainstream politicians implementing far-right politics. These are the options: the bad and the worse. That is until France takes seriously the threat posed by the far right and the need for a radical change.

(Aurelien Mondon is a Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Bath. Courtesy: The Conversation, an Australia-based nonprofit, independent global news organization dedicated to unlocking the knowledge of experts for the public good.)