On July 5, 1985, Jean-Marie Le Pen, president and founder of the National Front (FN), was a guest on the political show Facing 3. One sequence confronts him with a surprise guest chosen by the journalists. It is none other than the priest Gérard Deviens, then rector of the Catholic University of Lyon. The man is known for his social positions. He was also a professor of theology at the Higher Institute of Religious Culture in Abidjan (Ivory Coast) in the 1970s.
“Our objective was to compare the Christian values advocated by Jean-Marie Le Pen with those of this man of the Church,” remembers Geneviève Guicheney, co-host of the show. Indeed, in the central section of his autobiography, published a few months earlier, the president of the FN showed himself in a photo as the first to receive communion, thus recalling his Catholic culture and education. The confrontation is brutal from the first minutes. The leader of the far right denounces, faced with legitimate questions from Gérard Deviens, “an ecclesiastical tribunal”. He reminds, by monopolizing the floor, that he is the only politician to cite God, that his party fights against “depravity of morals, moral laxity, abortion…” According to Geneviève Guicheney,
“Mr Le Pen wanted to flatter the most reactionary fringe of Catholics. »
1984, a pivotal year
In reality, before 1984, the president of the FN did not care about religion. He flirted with the new right, a current of thought with a European national tendency, born at the end of the 1960s. Inseparable from the Research and Study Group for Civil
