The “Menhir” has never expressed any regret for its slippages, controlled or not, often repeated, which have earned it several legal convictions: from the gas chambers “point of detail of history”, to “inequality races” (1996), through the German Occupation “not particularly inhumane” (2005) or the physical attack of a socialist adversary (1997). “I’m going to make you run, you’ll see, redhead… Faggot!”, he once again attacked a hostile activist.
Eternal provocateur and pioneer of the European extreme right, did Le Pen really want power? “It was never brought to me on a platter,” he victimized himself.
But “deep down, he didn’t want to govern”, believes journalist Serge Moati, who followed “the devil of the Republic” for 25 years through documentaries and books.
“Having been considered a reprobate, an outcast, an anti-system, in fact helped him and paradoxically gave him popularity which gradually translated into the ballot boxes,” deciphers the director.
“A nice (national, editor’s note) Front interests no one”, summarized Le Pen, ironically: “before the + detail +, 2.2 million voters; after, 4.4 million”.
– “Fuck-the-shit magnificent” –
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 two weeks, millions of people march against racism and its political incarnation. Above all, Jean-Marie Le Pen allows the easy re-election of his sworn enemy Jacques Chirac.
The fact remains that over a sixty-year career and five presidential elections, Le Pen has awakened a French extreme right hitherto 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 fisherman, died at sea by jumping on a mine.
In Paris, the law student, loud-mouthed and brawling, favors activism over studies. He maintains varied 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 fuck-up”.
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 leaves again, this time to Algeria, where he will be accused of torture – which he contests.
A visceral anti-communist, Mr. Le Pen led the presidential campaign of far-right lawyer Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour in 1965, then was appointed in 1972 to head a new party which brought together neofascists: the National Front.
Le Pen, a puppet of the New Order, this small group which sought a respectable “façade” in the person of this former parliamentarian? Maybe.
But the tribune, his face covered with a blindfold after losing an eye in a domestic accident, shows himself to be a strategist and ends up establishing 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.
First successes from the 1983 municipal elections, and a favorite theme repeated over and over again: “A million unemployed is a million too many immigrants”.
The following year, he came close to 11% in the European elections – helped, deplores the right, by the socialist president François Mitterrand who made the doors of television studios open wide for him during the campaign.
The slogans follow one another: “The French first”, then “Le Pen, the people”, he who became a millionaire after inheriting in 1976, notably 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 enterprise, must endure the miseries of divisions.
At the end of the 1980s, his pride was undermined when his wife and mother of his three daughters suddenly left him before posing naked in Playboy magazine – France’s anti-lepenist joke.
Ten years later, while the heir apparent Bruno Mégret tried in vain to take the side, Le Pen disowned live on TF1’s 8 p.m. the daughter promised to the political legacy, Marie-Caroline. His fault? Having followed her megretist husband.
It is ultimately the youngest of the siblings, Marine, who is chosen to take up the torch.
Having become president of the FN in 2011, Le Pen wants to be loyal: “I take the whole history of my party and I take responsibility for everything.”
– “Durafour… crematorium” –
The liabilities are nevertheless heavy, Le Pen senior having notably shown throughout his career an obsession with the Jews. In 1958, he pointed out to the former head of government Pierre Mendès France “a certain number of patriotic and almost physical repulsions”.
Convicted at the end of the 1960s for apologizing for war crimes after having published a record of songs from the Third Reich, it was in 1987 that he compared the Shoah for the first time to “a detail of History”. A year later, he dared to play on words with the name of Minister Michel Durafour, “…crematory!”.
“A certain number of Jews consider that they have an immunity which is linked to this trait and that others owe them a sort of reverence, some even a particular prostration,” he lamented in 1991.
In his Memoirs, he states: “Anti-Semitism guarantees the homogeneity of the Jewish group, the Zionists know it.”
But when in 2015, Jean-Marie Le Pen promised a next “batch” to Patrick Bruel, Marine Le Pen believed that the “honorary president” of the National Front went against the party’s strategy of de-demonization.
Because the “lepenization of minds” finds its limits: certainly, the Menhir has imposed itself on the French political landscape and opened the way for the rise of nationalist and populist movements in Europe. But his excesses have inexorably marginalized him, preventing any alliance, both in France and in the Parliament of Strasbourg.
The darling daughter finally excluded her father from the movement he had founded forty-three years earlier – alongside a former Waffen-SS, Pierre Bousquet – then renamed 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 before the media and the courts, fades over the years. Even with the ex-wife, again housed in the old marital home, or Marion Maréchal, the granddaughter who had defied his authority by refusing to compete again in the 2017 legislative elections: all are forgiven.
From his office at the Montretout manor or, more and more often, from the home of his new wife, Jany, in Rueil-Malmaison, west of Paris, Jean-Marie Le Pen has entertained in recent years with a vengeance. Between two hummed songs, he suggested that he would vote for Eric Zemmour in the 2022 presidential election.
A heart attack a year later forced him to give up social life. From February 2024, his three daughters Marie-Caroline, Yann and Marine had been designated 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 gave rise to the possibility that his daughter Marine would take the far right to power, a dream in which he had finally started to believe but which was again shattered on a “republican front”.
The defeat accompanied an inexorable decline in Menhir’s health: “heart failure”, “profound deterioration of his physical and psychological capacities”, had identified experts called to determine if he could appear at the “maxi-trial” of the National Front in the affair of the assistants of Lepenist MEPs.
“No awareness of the purpose, meaning and scope of this hearing,” concluded the doctors, leaving only Marine Le Pen and twenty-four other party figures to answer for a vast alleged system of embezzlement of European funds for the benefit of of training.
For his funeral, Jean-Marie Le Pen demanded “Beethoven’s concerto in D major for violin and orchestra”. At the time of its first performance, two centuries ago, critics saw it as a work lacking “coherence”, “a cluttered and disjointed accumulation of ideas” and “a continual din”.
