The “Menhir” is gone. Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of the National Front, died at 96, his family announces to AFP Tuesday January 7. From his first mandate, in 1956, until his last breath, the tutelary figure of the French extreme right will have profoundly marked political life, to the rhythm of provocations, scandals and coups, but also of electoral breakthroughs historical.
Jean Louis Marie Le Pen was born on June 20, 1928, into a modest family in La-Trinité-sur-Mer, a fishing port in Morbihan. He was raised the hard way by a seamstress mother and a fisherman father whom he lost at the age of 14. At school, the man nicknamed Jeanjean is talented but undisciplined and a fighter, which led to him being expelled from several establishments. With his baccalaureate in hand, the young Breton studied law in Paris. With his words already high and assured, he becomes president of the “Corpo”, the Students’ Association. A position that he will have to leave after two years, paying the price for his verbal excesses.
We could see him becoming a lawyer. But it was the military world that attracted him, he who, at 16, tried, according to L’Express, to join the French Interior Forces. Without success, due to his too young age. In 1954 – he was 26 years old – Le Pen joined the Indochina War as a paratrooper. When he arrived there, Dien Bien Phu had already fallen, and the war ended quickly. The withdrawal of French troops sounds like a humiliation for him. On his return, he became involved in politics, within Pierre Poujade's movement for the defense of traders and artisans.
The early legislative elections of 1956 gave these slayers of supermarkets, taxes and the institutions of the Fourth Republic the opportunity to campaign. “Take out the leavers”, proclaims (already) the slogan. Jean Le Pen, who has now decided to call himself Jean-Marie, tours the stands in the four corners of France. On the radio, the still young man invites the French to “drive out all corrupt and incapable leaders”. During the ballot, which was proportional, the Poujadists won more than 11% of the votes and sent 52 deputies to the National Assembly.
At the Palais-Bourbon, Jean-Marie Le Pen is true to his reputation: turbulent and provocative. “When a speaker from the Communist Party comes to give me lessons on respecting the law of my own country, I feel obliged to remind him that with these 52 men, the 80,000 corpses of the war of 'Indochina that there is between his group and us', he says during a session, according to comments unearthed by Slate.
While the Algerian War was in full swing, Jean-Marie Le Pen decided to leave the gilding of the Assembly for six months and returned to the ranks of the paratroopers, with whom he participated in the Battle of Algiers. Did he practice torture there? He has been accused of this several times by testimonies relayed in the press, journalistic investigations and more recently by historians. Jean-Marie Le Pen, for his part, denies outright in his Memoirspublished in 2018: “It’s bogus, obviously bogus, which doesn’t stand up to the most rapid analysis.”
Back in Paris, Le Pen remained obsessed with French Algeria. At odds with Poujade, whom he considered too moderate, he created with a few other anti-Gaullists the National Front of Combatants, then the National Front for French Algeria. A few years later, he led the campaign of Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour, far-right candidate in the 1965 presidential election against General de Gaulle.
But the 1960s were above all synonymous with electoral defeats for Jean-Marie Le Pen, who failed twice in the legislative elections. We had to wait until 1972 to see him return to the forefront. That year, the neo-fascist group New Order sought to broaden its audience by bringing together several small far-right groups. And suggests that Jean-Marie Le Pen take the lead. The National Front was born.
The party only has a few hundred members. At the polls, voters are not there either. Jean-Marie Le Pen obtained only 0.75% of the votes in the 1974 presidential election and failed to obtain the 500 sponsorships necessary to run in the 1981 election. But at the head of his party which he led 'an iron fist, a man knows how to be patient. In 1983, the 16% collected by the FN list of Jean-Pierre Stirbois during a municipal election in Dreux (Eure-et-Loir) caused a first political shock. Year after year, from election to election, the wave rises.
In 1984, Jean-Marie Le Pen was elected MEP, a mandate he held until 2019. Four years later, thanks to the reintroduction of the proportional system, he made his comeback to the Assembly national, in the company of 34 FN running mates. Nothing seems to be able to thwart the inevitable progression of the National Front, not even the repeated slip-ups of its leader. Comments on gas chambers “detail of the story”, “Durafour crematorium”, speech on “racial inequality”, attack on a socialist candidate in the legislative elections in Mantes-la-Jolie… Episodes – among others – which earned him regular condemnation by the courts.
He still had to wait until 2002 to reach the peak of his political career. That year, the Frontist leader ran for his fourth presidential election, an exercise in which he got used to honorable scores (14.4% in 1988 and 15% in 1995). In his program, the Breton offers a “national preference” on all floors and promises to“immediately expel all illegal immigrants”.
Champion of economic protectionism and “family preference”he also undertakes to denounce European treaties and reduce taxation. On the security level, which will become one of the crucial themes of the campaign, he shows his muscles with blows of “zero tolerance” and of “dismantling of gangs in cities and suburbs”.
On the day of the first round, April 21, Jean-Marie Le Pen caused one of the biggest earthquakes of the Fifth Republic by qualifying, to everyone's surprise, for the final duel against Jacques Chirac. “It is driven by the desire of voters to sweep away the right and left of government, and by concerns about identity and security”summarizes the historian Nicolas Lebourg in Liberation. With nearly 5 million votes, or 16.86% of the vote, the Frontist candidate is ahead of the Socialist Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin, stuck at 16.18%, and allows his party to enter a new era.
“It’s the birth of something,” predicted the youngest of her daughters, Marine Le Pen, the same evening. The sister of Marie-Caroline and Yann, whom he had with Pierrette Lalanne, was then simple legal director of the FN. She is only 33 years old and will, from then on, climb the ladder and push her father towards the exit. For Jean-Marie Le Pen, what followed was akin to a slow personal decline. In the second round, victim of a “republican front”, he only won 17.79% of the votes. In 2007, for his last presidential election, he came out in the first round with 10.44% of the vote. In 2010, at the age of 81, he formalized his farewell to the stage by renouncing a new mandate at the head of his party.
Freed from the weight of responsibilities, Jean-Marie Le Pen then began a new career: a free electron in politics. His energy was quickly absorbed by his standoff with Marine Le Pen, whose strategy of “demonization” he criticized and who, on the basis of new slip-ups, ended up initiating disciplinary proceedings against him in 2015. The affair even found before the courts, which validated in 2018 the exclusion of the founder of the National Front from his own party.
After his departure from the European Parliament in 2019, which he had gradually deserted, Jean-Marie Le Pen is more discreet, content to comment from time to time on political news, as when he congratulates himself on the success of the National Rally in the legislative elections. His name appears at regular intervals in the press, for his health concerns, his legal news and his religious marriage in 2021 with his second, Jany. In the fall of 2024, he is absent from the trial of the RN parliamentary assistants, legal experts having judged his state of health “incompatible” with his presence at the hearing.
Jean-Marie Le Pen should be buried, alongside his father, in the Trinité-sur-Mer cemetery, where his family has a plot. According to the confidences he had given to L’Express in 2018, the “Menhir” will have a tombstone on which only “Jean-Marie” will appear. A simple first name for this man who was sorry, as he wrote in his autobiography, to see “[son] country shrink, to the point of changing completely… “this strange phenomenon was the driving force of my political life and the sorrow of my life in short.”
