Not really the straw man we hoped for
Born in 1928 in La Trinité-sur-Mer in Brittany, Jean-Marie Le Pen became a ward at the age of 14 after the death of his father. A law graduate and holder of a degree in classics, he served in the Foreign Legion during the Indochina War. Elected in 1956 as deputy for Paris thanks to the Poujadist wave – he was then the youngest parliamentarian in France – he founded the National Front (FN) in 1972. “In reality, the activists who came to seek him out to install him at the head of this new party saw him as a straw man. It was very bad for them: Le Pen very quickly took leadership within the movement“, specifies Jean-Yves Camus, director of the Observatory of Political Radicalities at the Jean Jaurès Foundation and specialist in the extreme right.
Convinced that the greatness of the nation is crumbling because of French decolonization in Algeria, Jean-Marie Le Pen wants to reactivate the old French extreme right. But the beginnings are difficult. The “pirate” (he lost an eye during a fight during a demonstration in Paris) obtained only 0.7% of the votes during the presidential election of 1974. In 1981, he failed to bring together the five hundred signatures necessary to be able to appear. “But he gradually made this twilight formation a sort of common front of all the components of the nationalist right, ranging from monarchists to republicans, people from the resistance to neo-Nazis. In doing so, he revives a political family that everyone thought was definitively dead on May 8, 1945. underlines the political scientist.
The first electoral breakthrough came during the municipal elections of 1983. The following year, his list obtained nearly 11% of the votes in the European elections. In 1984, he was elected European deputy and, two years later, he installed himself, cheeky and bravado, once again on the benches of the National Assembly, with thirty-four other FN deputies thanks to the proportional vote.
Unbearable excesses
Las, “Jean-Marie Le Pen then shoots himself in the foot by multiplying anti-Semitic and Holocaust denial statements“ analyzes Jean-Yves Camus. In fact, the Frontist leader accumulated unbearable excesses: towards the Jews when, in 1987, he described the gas chambers as “detail of the story of the Second World War” ; towards immigrants, when he says he sees immigration as a “invasion” ; towards gays when he believes that homosexuality is a “danger to the survival of humanity”. These outbursts, which he fully accepts, will cause him to be condemned on multiple occasions by the courts and shamed by a large part of the French population.
“From then onadds the specialist, the alliance of the rights with him becomes impossible. Jean-Marie Le Pen nevertheless continues his trajectory, alone, and manages over the years to create the third French political family. A family marked by divorce: Le Pen had difficulty supporting the rise of her ambitious number two, Bruno Mégret, and this growing rivalry led to the split of the FN in 1998. “I will not abandon the helm of the ship to a handful of treacherous lieutenants and quartermasters” let go of the one we now nickname “the menhir”. From then on, the party lost momentum, in the European elections of June 1999 (5.7%) as in all the by-elections. Furthermore, at the beginning of 2000, its leader was sentenced to one year of ineligibility for having attacked a socialist candidate in May 1997. He had to give up his mandate as regional councilor of Provence for one year. Alpes-Côte-d’Azur and his mandate as a European deputy (which he returned to one year later).
Over the years and provocations, Jean-Marie Le Pen has established himself on the media and political scene as the undisputed leader of the radical and xenophobic right. He readily presents himself as an “anti-system” candidate, focused on the preservation of national interests and the rejection of foreigners. “He was a beast of the stage, a rogue who crushed his competitors thanks to his talents as a tribuneremembers Jean-Yves Camus. Persevering, he tirelessly repeated the same credo ‘sovereignty, immigration, security’; impulsive and proud, he was unlike any other politician.”
Since 2011, Jean-Marie Le Pen has been in the background. His daughter Marine Le Pen took up the torch. A strategist of demonization, she strives to give her father’s party, renamed the National Rally (RN), a more moderate and less extremist image, to the great displeasure of the patriarch who does not hesitate to oppose her head-on. Some even believe that he wanted his daughter to be shipwrecked. His niece, Marion Maréchal Le Pen, joined forces with Éric Zemmour. The Lepenist lineage continues, more vibrant than ever, its ideas sometimes contaminating the discourse of “traditional” parties. The ideological specter of Jean-Marie Le Pen is likely to haunt French political life for a long time to come…
