Disappearance. Jean-Marie Le Pen, the “Menhir”, died at 96

With the death of Jean-Marie Le Pen this Tuesday at the age of 96, the French far right lost its historic leader. The one who, for the first time in 2002, took the National Front (FN) to the second round of a presidential election. His political feat which will not fail to be recalled, in their duty of inventory, the Frontist activists from the first hour, who remained faithful to ”Jean-Marie”. It was April 21, 2002. The president of the FN (16.86% of the votes) eliminated the socialist Lionel Jospin against Jacques Chirac. An explosion in the political landscape which, on May 1st, brought millions of people into the streets. On May 5, Le Pen was largely beaten by Chirac (82.21%) who benefited from this unprecedented Republican front. Five years later, the representative of the extreme right will not repeat his score.

An already discreet birthday

Today in mourning, the ”Bardella generation” could stick to the minimum service. She barely knew or frequented the Frontist leader. The qualifications of his daughter, Marine Le Pen, for the presidential elections of 2017 and 2022 (nearly 42% of the votes), have also relegated the feat of the FN president to a distant memory. Above all, too much tribute risks harming the young leaders of the National Rally. Like Marine Le Pen and the rest of the political family, who have worked for years to erase the image of a “Menhir” that has become too cumbersome. At issue: the past and especially the racist, anti-Semitic and Holocaust denial remarks which earned Jean-Marie Le Pen multiple condemnations.

Already in 2022, the fiftieth anniversary of the far-right party was celebrated with restraint. “I am the Fantômas of politics,” said Jean-Marie Le Pen ironically, not invited. Ghosted, after a tumultuous half-century in the political arena.

The express bio of Jean-Marie Le Pen

• June 20, 1928: Birth in La Trinité-sur-mer (Morbihan). He is the son of Jean Le Pen, fisherman, and Anne-Marie Hervé, seamstress.
• October 5, 1972: Creation of the National Front, chaired by Jean-Marie Le Pen.
• 1st November 1976: An explosion blows out the Villa Poirier building in Paris, where the Le Pen family resides. This attack has never been claimed.
• September 13, 1987: He pronounces the sentence about the gas chambers, a “detail” of the Second World War.
• December 5, 1998: National Council of the FN in Paris where 300 executives insult Jean-Marie Le Pen. It was a split: Bruno Mégret immediately created the MNR.
• 21 avril 2002 : Jean-Marie Le Pen enters the second round of the presidential election against Jacques Chirac. He is ahead of Lionel Jospin by around 200,000 votes.
• January 16, 2011: He leaves the presidency of the FN to Marine Le Pen, elected against Bruno Gollnisch. He becomes honorary president.
• August 20, 2015: Jean-Marie Le Pen is excluded from the FN by the executive office meeting in disciplinary training. A decision confirmed a year later by the Nanterre High Court.
• 10 mars 2018 : Jean-Marie Le Pen is stripped of his position as honorary president. Activists largely adopted the change in the party statutes providing for the removal of the title. The National Front is renamed the National Rally.
• February 3, 2022: Jean-Marie Le Pen, 93, is hospitalized for a stroke. He came out two days later with this sentence: “It’s not this time. »

You IIIe Reich on FN

Orphaned by his father at 14 and a ward of the nation, the ”Breton” made his debut, encouraged by Pierre Poujade: at 28, he was elected deputy in 1956. A soldier of Indochina, he left to fight in Algeria: period during which late-admitted suspicions of torture weighed on him. In the 1960s, Jean-Marie Le Pen directed SERP, a small company specializing in the reissue of “traditional” songs which published a collection of the repertoire of the Third Reich.

In 1972, Le Pen, who led the campaign of Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour (far-right presidential candidate in 1965), took the helm of the National Front for French Unity. The flame party – from the nationalist and neo-fascist New Order movement – was co-founded by Pierre Bousquet and Léon Gaultier, two former members of the Waffen-SS in Nazi Germany. Confidential score (0.74%) in the 1974 presidential election and a long journey through the desert before the breakthrough under François Mitterrand’s first seven-year term.

“Detail of the History”

The FN sent 10 elected officials, including Jean-Marie Le Pen, to the European Parliament in 1984. And 35 to the National Assembly in 1986, the year of the first cohabitation. The far right is anchoring itself in French political life and Jean-Marie Le Pen – stentorian voice and outrageous verb – in his role as tribune, increasingly inaccessible. His “detail of history” about the gas chambers during the Second World War and his macabre play on words “Durafour crematorium” about the minister Michel Durafour are engraved in the collective unconscious.

2018, “the terrible year”

In 2011, the president of the FN passed the torch to his daughter, Marine Le Pen, who attacked the normalization of the party and worked to “kill the father”. In 2015, after new controversial comments on the Shoah, Jean-Marie Le Pen was excluded from “his” party! Rejected by the courts which confirmed the exclusion a year later, the ”patriarch” saved face by remaining honorary president. Not for very long. 2018 will be Jean-Marie Le Pen’s ”annus horribilis”. His position as honorary president was abolished and the FN renamed the National Rally almost unanimously by the activists. The ultimate humiliation for the clan leader who put his family in the spotlight and at the service of his political ambitions: Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, his granddaughter and niece of Marine, in turn gets rid of the surname which is visibly too heavy to bear.

At the end of this twilight journey, the old frontist leader caught a last ray of sunshine with the success in booksellers of his memoirs. Way to forget the political break with some of his family and the family disputes. A last stand before disappearing from the media scene, forced by declining health.

In the spring of 2024, aged 95, the tribune was placed under the guardianship of his three daughters, Marie-Caroline, Yann and Marine Le Pen, with whom relations were finally calmed. In September, a new trial awaited him, this time targeting a system of embezzlement of European funds allocated to parliamentary assistants for the benefit of the FN.

The mystery surrounding his war chest

Money matters also loomed large throughout Jean-Marie Le Pen’s life. Son of a fisherman in La Trinité-sur-Mer, he liked to recall his modest origins. Two marriages – the first with Pierrette, the second Jany – and the mysterious inheritance of Hubert Lambert, in the mid-1970s, made Jean-Marie Le Pen a rich man. External sign of this war treasure, the Montretout estate, near Paris. In this impenetrable fortress, the president of the FN led the life of a castle surrounded by art objects and he wrote the history of the FN. This will be the other legacy to manage.

Jean-Marie Le Pen repeatedly convicted for his excesses

Jean-Marie Le Pen built a large part of his political career through sometimes revisionist, racist or homophobic statements. A “goodwill” always assumed.

• “Sidaïque”: In 1987, he declared about AIDS patients: “Aids sufferers are contagious through their sweat, their tears, their saliva, their contact. He’s a kind of leper. »
• “The occupation is not inhumane”: “In France, the Occupation was not particularly inhumane, even if there were blunders, inevitable in a country of 550,000 square kilometers.” For this 2005 statement, Jean-Marie Le Pen was sentenced to three months in prison and a fine of 10,000 euros for contesting a crime against humanity.
• The “detail of the story”: in September 1987, he uttered one of his most controversial sentences: “I am not saying that the gas chambers did not exist. I haven’t specifically studied the issue. But I believe it is a point of detail in the history of the Second World War. » In 1991, the Versailles Court of Appeal ordered him to pay 1.2 million francs (183,000 euros) to 11 associations for this statement on RTL.
• “Durafour crematorium”: In 1988, during the FN summer school, Jean-Marie Le Pen made a play on words about Michel Durafour, then minister of the civil service. He calls him “Mister Durafour-crematory”. The Paris Court of Appeal will sentence him to a fine of 10,000 francs (1,524 euros) for this offensive play on words.
• “Petain”: In Rivarol, in April 2015, Le Pen rehabilitated Pétain: “I never considered Marshal Pétain as a traitor. »

You can pay tribute to the deceased on their memorial page on the Libra Memoria website and offer your condolences to their loved ones by showing your sympathy.