The face told him something, but he couldn’t really remember who it was. Even when he was told the name of the new prime minister, Michel Barnier, Jean-Marie Le Pen was not able to recall in his memory the slightest episode of his career. Nor even to place it on the French political scene.
In front of him, the television is constantly switched on, blaring programs from BFM-TV or CNews, but his visitors half-heartedly confess the same observation: the former president of the National Front (FN) no longer really seems to understand the world that surrounds it and even less the upheavals of current events. Does he only remember the major episodes of his own political life? “The other time, when I was talking about April 21, 2002, he no longer knew that he had reached the second round of the presidential election”, confides Lorrain de Saint-Affrique, faithful for fifty years, who continues to take the train from Le Mans once or twice a month to spend two or three days with him.
At 96 years old, the former leader of the French far right gets up around 3 or 4 p.m., walks a little on the arm of his caregiver in the garden of La Bonbonnière, this house that Jean-Marie and Jany Le Pen occupy Rueil-Malmaison (Hauts-de-Seine), a chic suburb west of Paris, but it does not go beyond. Since February, the one formerly called “the Menhir” has been placed under a “future protection mandate”, which gives his three daughters the right to supervise all of his decisions.
He will not appear at the trial of the FN parliamentary assistants at the European Parliament, for which he was indicted for “embezzlement and complicity in embezzlement of public funds”, exempted by two medical certificates which attest to the alteration of his cognitive faculties and his inability to respond to the magistrates.
“He’s pretending”
The few visitors, former elected officials and fellow travelers of the National Front or his ex-wife, Pierrette, who reconnected with him – no journalist has had access to him since 2023 – all say almost the same thing: Jean- Marie Le Pen is today considerably weakened intellectually. He can repeat ready-made phrases with a clumsy air – “I look at the world…” or “You have to let things happen” –, the conversation rarely goes further.
These songs from the interwar period that he willingly sings, these Latin quotations that he still knows, these gritty jokes that he still dares are like a mask intended to deceive. “He has kept elements of language from his past political life, a sort of reflex which can create an illusion for a few moments, assures her youngest, Yann, the only one of the three Le Pen daughters to agree to speak about her father to the World. He’s been performing so long that it’s as if that veneer remains on him. But, in reality, he is pretending. »
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