“The Lambert legacy changed everything in his life,” noted Lorrain de Saint-Affrique, who was Jean-Marie Le Pen’s press secretary, in a book published in 1998 (Dans l’Ombre de Le Pen, avec Gabriel Fredet, Hachette Littérature, p34). This famous inheritance, obtained in 1977, allowed the founder of the FN to become a millionaire and to settle in the Montretout manor, which became his stronghold, an office and a place of political meetings where several members of his family would stay.
The latter was born in Saint-Cloud – the town of Montretout, near Paris – on August 20, 1934. He is the only son of Léon Lambert, heir to the cement works of the same name, and Renée de Saint-Julien, nurse. This union would have, for the Lambert family, constituted a “misalliance” according to an investigation by the Monde dating from 1985. Léon Lambert, born in 1876, died after the Second World War. The son was said to have been briefly married but ended his life single and without issue. Many testimonies describe him as very close to his mother, whose name he bears in his publications which he signs “Hubert de Saint-Julien -. She died at the beginning of 1976, a few months before her son.
A career on the far right?
A far-right activist at an early age, Hubert Lambert published articles in their magazines: “le Faisceau” of the European Nationalist Youth, “l’Heure française” and soon “Jeune Nation”, as reported in this article from the daily The Worldpublished shortly after the latter’s death. As shown in this example of an article by Hubert Saint-Julien that we found in 1956 in l’Heure Française, he calls for a common platform between nationalist “small groups”.
Other texts are attributed to him, notably a book on the politician and soldier Louis Rossel, shot after the Commune in 1971. But, according to the investigation of Monde dating from 1985 and cited above, this p authorship was contested by a witness claiming to have been the true author.
He would have held several administrative positions in the family group before devoting himself solely to his political activities in the 1970s.
First financing
In the mid-1970s, he met Jean-Marie Le Pen during an evening, as several biographers have recounted. The heir quickly provided subsidies to the movement of the former deputy who invited him to the central committee of his party as a “military advisor”.
His last years were marked by episodes of depression and alcohol addiction. Witnesses speak of a wavering mental state, which his legatee insisted on denying after his death.
“Blood on the sheets”
Hubert Lambert, then aged 42, suffering from cirrhosis, would have suffered from the rupture of an esophageal varice on the night of September 24 to 25, 1976, (The Parisian quoting extracts from In the Hell of Montretout, Flammarion, O. Beaumont). When the Le Pen family moved there, a few weeks later, there was “in the deceased’s old room, […] blood everywhere. […]. “We slept in this room that same evening. And, frankly, we had no problem with that. We were even very comfortable,” Jean-Marie Le Pen reportedly declared.
A contested heritage
In the will he wrote nine months earlier, Lambert bequeathed his fortune to the former soldier: an amount difficult to estimate of some 30 million Francs (4.5 million euros) in financial assets, as well as the private mansion of 430 m2 on three levels with outbuildings and a park of almost 5 hectares: Montretout . The family of the deceased, in particular his cousin, brought a lawsuit for capture of inheritance, on the grounds in particular that Lambert “had a habit of distributing successive and contradictory wills to his friends and relatives,” we can read in The World dated October 13, 1976. The legal battle was finally settled amicably.
For Le Pen, this is a turning point. “From this legacy, Jean-Marie Le Pen will make politics as he sees fit”, comments historian and political scientist Valérie Irgounet in a program for France Inter. “Without Lambert, no FN, without Le Pen, no Lambert,” the politician’s advisor is said to have declared, according to comments reported by the historian according to which the offices of the far-right party in its early days “s ‘lit with candles’.
Jean-Marie Le Pen’s fortune allowed him to continue his campaigns without feeling the financial constraints he had experienced until then. The famous “Lambert inheritance” was the first in a series, others coming to increase the wealth of the Le Pens.
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