This Tuesday, January 7, Jean-Marie Le Pen died at the age of 96. A historic figure of the extreme right in France, he reached the second round of the presidential election in 2002.
Jean-Marie Le Pen, a figure of the French far right and finalist in the 2002 presidential election, died Tuesday at the age of 96 in Garches (Hauts-de-Seine), in an establishment where he had been admitted several weeks ago.
His family sent a statement to AFP
“Jean-Marie Le Pen, surrounded by his family, was called to God this Tuesday at noon”, his family indicated in a statement sent to AFP.
An outstanding tribune, a sulphurous provocateur obsessed with immigration and Jews, a patriarch thwarted by his own, Jean-Marie Le Pen brought the French far right out of its marginality during a political career that marked the Fifth Republic.
The “Menhir” has never expressed any regret for its often repeated, controlled or uncontrolled excesses, which have earned it several convictions in court: from the gas chambers “a detail of history”, to “racial inequality” (1996), through the German Occupation “not particularly inhuman” (2005) or the physical assault of a socialist opponent (1997). “I'll make you run, you'll see, redhead… Faggot!”, he had again attacked a hostile activist.
Eternal provocateur and pioneer of the European extreme right, did Le Pen really want power ? “No one ever brought it to me on a plate“, he victimized himself.
But “deep down, he didn't want to govern”, believes above all the journalist Serge Moati who followed “the devil of the Republic” for 25 years through documentaries and works.
“Having been considered a reprobate, an outcast, an anti-system, actually suited him and paradoxically gave him a popularity that gradually translated into the ballot boxes”, the director deciphers.
“A nice Front (national, editor's note) doesn't interest anyone”, Le Pen summed up, ironically: “before the details, 2.2 million voters; after, 4.4 million”.
“Fout-la-merde magnifique”
The most emblematic of his successes will remain unfinished. On April 21, 2002, at the age of 73 and for his fourth candidacy for the Élysée, he created a surprise by qualifying for the second round of the election.
The triumph has its downside: for fifteen days, millions of people marched against racism and its political incarnation. Above all, Jean-Marie Le Pen allowed the easy re-election of his sworn enemy Jacques Chirac.
The fact remains that over the course of sixty years of career and five presidential elections, Le Pen has awakened a French far right that had until then been disqualified by the Collaboration.
Born on June 20, 1928, in La Trinité-sur-Mer (Morbihan), the Breton became a ward of the Nation at the age of 14 when his father, a fishing boat owner, died at sea after stepping on a mine.
In Paris, the law student, loud-mouthed and a fighter, favored activism over studies. He keeps some motley friendships, from the radical Italian MP Marco Pannella to the New Wave filmmaker Claude Chabrol, committed to the left, and who will see in the tribune a “magnificent troublemaker”.
Le Pen then went to Indochina, where he became friends with a future cinema legend, Alain Delon. Back in Paris, in 1956, at the age of 27, he became the youngest member of the National Assembly on the Poujadist lists, in a declining Fourth Republic. Then he left again, this time to Algeria, where he was accused of torture – which he denies.
A visceral anti-communist, Mr. Le Pen led the presidential campaign of the far-right lawyer Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour in 1965 and was then appointed in 1972 to head a new party that brought together neo-fascists: the National Front.
Le Pen, a puppet of Ordre nouveau, this small group that was looking for a respectable “facade” in the person of this former parliamentarian? Perhaps.
But the tribune, his face covered with a bandage after losing an eye in a domestic accident, shows himself to be a strategist and ends up imposing himself as the de jure and de facto leader of this electoral machine. And he chose the same emblem as that of the MSI, the Italian party that remained loyal to Mussolini: a tricolor flame.
“I take responsibility for everything”
First successes in the 1983 municipal elections, and a favorite theme repeated ad nauseam: “A million unemployed is a million too many immigrants”.
The following year, he nearly won 11% in the European elections – helped, the right deplores, by the socialist president François Mitterrand who threw open the doors of the television studios during the campaign.
200% Deposit Bonus up to €3,000 180% First Deposit Bonus up to $20,000The slogans follow one after the other: “The French first”, then “Le Pen, the people”, he who became a millionaire after inheriting in 1976, in particular, a private mansion in the extension of the beautiful Parisian districts.
But alongside the splendors – 15% in the presidential elections of 1988 and 1995 -, the one who manages the FN like “a family shop” and his family like a political business, must endure the miseries of divisions.
At the end of the 80s, his pride was undermined when his wife and mother of his three daughters abruptly left him before posing nude in Playboy magazine – anti-Le Pen France mocked.
Ten years later, while the dauphin Bruno Mégret tried in vain to take the side, Le Pen renounced live on the 8pm news of TF1 the girl promised to the political inheritance, Marie-Caroline. Her fault? Having followed her Mégretist husband.
It is finally the youngest of the siblings, Marine, who is designated to take up the torch.
Having become president of the FN in 2011, Le Pen fille wants to be loyal: “I take the whole history of my party and I assume everything”.
“Durafour… crematorium” –
The past is nevertheless heavy, Le Pen père having notably shown throughout his career an obsession with the Jews. In 1958, he pointed out that former head of government Pierre Mendès France had “a certain number of patriotic and almost physical repulsions”.
Convicted at the end of the 1960s for condoning war crimes after publishing a record of songs from the Third Reich, it was in 1987 that he first compared the Holocaust to “a detail of History“. A year later, he dared to make a play on words with the name of the minister Michel Durafour, “…crematorium!”.
“A certain number of Jews consider that they have an immunity that is linked to this trait and that others owe them a sort of reverence, some even a particular prostration”, he laments in 1991.
In his Memoirs, he hammers home: “Anti-Semitism guarantees the homogeneity of the Jewish group, the Zionists know it”.
But when in 2015, Jean-Marie Le Pen promises a next “batch” to Patrick Bruel, Marine Le Pen considers that the “honorary president” of the National Front goes against the party's strategy of demonization.
Because the “lepenization of minds” finds its limits: certainly, the Menhir has imposed itself on the French political landscape and paved the way for the rise of nationalist and populist movements in Europe. But its excesses have inexorably marginalized it, preventing any alliance, both in France and in the Parliament of Strasbourg.
The beloved daughter finally excludes her father from the movement that he had founded forty-three years earlier – alongside a former Waffen-SS, Pierre Bousquet – then renames the party the National Rally.
“A suicide”, comments Le Pen, castigating the purges against the most radical elements of the movement, he who had theorized the gathering of all the extreme right, from traditionalist Catholics to neo-pagans, nostalgic for Vichy and even neo-Nazis included.
The family war, duly staged in front of the media and the courts, has faded over the years. Even with the ex-wife, once again housed in the former marital home, or Marion Maréchal, the granddaughter who had defied his authority by refusing to run again in the 2017 legislative elections: all are forgiven.
“Continual noise”
From his office in the Montretout manor or, increasingly often, from the home of his new wife, Jany, in Rueil-Malmaison, west of Paris, Jean-Marie Le Pen has been receiving guests in droves in recent years. Between two songs hummed, he had hinted that he would vote for Eric Zemmour in the 2022 presidential election.
A heart attack a year later forced him to give up social events. From February 2024, his three daughters Marie-Caroline, Yann and Marine had been appointed to manage his day-to-day affairs, within the framework of legal protection close to guardianship.
While the RN triumphed in the European elections in June of the same year, a providential dissolution suggested the possibility that his daughter Marine would bring the far right to power, a dream in which he had finally begun to believe but which was once again shattered on a “republican front”.
The defeat accompanied an inexorable decline in the health of the Menhir: “heart failure”, “profound deterioration of his physical and psychological capacities“, had identified experts called upon to determine if he could appear at the “maxi-trial” of the National Front in the affair of the assistants of the Le Pen MEPs.
“No awareness of the purpose, meaning and scope of this hearing”, the doctors had concluded, leaving Marine Le Pen and twenty-four other party figures alone to answer for a vast alleged system of embezzlement of European funds for the benefit of the training.
For his funeral, Jean-Marie Le Pen had demanded “Beethoven's concerto in D major for violin and orchestra”. At the time of its first performance, two centuries ago, critics had seen it as a work lacking “of coherence”, “a dense and disjointed heap of ideas” and “a continual din”.