“The Menhir”, as his troops once called him, has fallen. Jean-Marie Le Pen died on Tuesday January 7 at the age of 96. A major political figure of the 20th century, provocative and outrageous, he will remain the one who succeeded in bringing the far right out of electoral marginality. Co-founder of the National Front in 1972, alongside former Waffen-SS and neo-Nazis, he gradually expanded the electoral base of his party until, in 2002, it took it to the second round of the election. presidential. A performance repeated by his daughter in 2017 and 2022.
Beyond his extremist convictions, this man of great urbanity, cameras and microphones turned off, represented a political world in the process of disappearing: in form, real eloquence, and in substance, real historical culture.
Only son, Jean Le Pen – he would only become Jean-Marie later – was born on June 20, 1928, in a small house in La Trinité-sur-Mer (Morbihan), with granite walls and a dirt floor. “French native of Breton race, not the little white and black, good milkmaid, but the tall blonde”, did he present himself in The Le Pen Album, published in 1984.
“Breton and native French”, he resumes in 2018 in the first volume of his Memoirs (Memoirs. Son of the nationEd. Muller). His family is made up of farmers on his mother’s side, fishermen on his father’s side. He was recognized as a ward of the Nation after the death of his father in the summer of 1942, following the explosion of a maritime mine.
Engaged in Indochina then in Algeria
At the end of 1944, the young man approached the Resistance maquis, but his “first protest” ultimately consists of making, then putting up, posters against the purge of employees. Having become a student in Paris, he joined the Unef, where he chaired the Law Corporation from 1949 to 1951. He then distinguished himself by his charisma and his good punch.
On two occasions, he did not hesitate to join the paratroopers. In 1954, he embarked to fight the Marxist Viet Minh in Indochina. He arrived there after the fall of Diên Bien Phu. In 1956, he left the benches of the National Assembly, where he had just been elected, to go to Algiers. He was accused of having practiced torture there.
“What is torture?” Where does it begin, where does it end? “, he asks in his Memoirs. While assuming the fact that, to obtain information, the French army – not his company, he assures – practiced “the beatings, the gegene and the bathtub, but no mutilation, nothing that affects physical integrity”.
The man then becomes a figure of the extreme right, of whom he will be involved in all the fights around these two leitmotifs: anti-communism and anti-Gaullism. “Twice, in 1944 and 1962, unfortunate nationals were excluded from history by the same adversary, de Gaulle,” he denounces in his Memoirsexplaining that “it’s in their name” that he fought.
Of all the fights of the extreme right
In 1956, he was the youngest member of the National Assembly, as would be his granddaughter Marion Maréchal-Le Pen in 2012. He established himself as the leader of the Poujadist parliamentarians, Pierre Poujade not being a deputy. Jean-Marie Le Pen systematically quarrels with the personalities successively embodying the extreme right… until it is him! In 1957, he broke up with Pierre Poujade. Another break in 1966 with Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour, candidate for the 1965 presidential election on behalf of those nostalgic for French Algeria, and of whom he was campaign director.
Originally, it was a small activist group – New Order – which launched the “National Front for French Unity” in October 1972, in order to broaden its audience in the 1973 legislative elections, proposing to Jean-Marie Le Pen to take over the presidency. The person concerned was re-elected as a deputy in 1958, with the support of the liberal-conservative right (he then sat in the same parliamentary group as Valéry Giscard d’Estaing), before being defeated in 1962, and again in 1968. From November 1973, the FN experienced its first split with the departure of some of the former leaders of New Order. Jean-Marie Le Pen is now the sole master on board.
Until the election of François Mitterrand, the FN remained a small group: its leader obtained 0.75% of the votes cast in the 1974 presidential election and did not gather the sponsorship necessary to run in the 1981 election. Everything changed with the election of François Mitterrand. arrival of the left to power: in reaction, the extreme right is progressing. His glibness did the rest, with a helping hand from the Élysée so that he was invited, in February 1984, to the major political program “L’heure de vérité” on Antenne 2. A few months later, during in the European elections in June, the list he led obtained 10.95% and ten elected officials. This is the “Le Pen phenomenon”.
The detail that changes everything
From then on, he became essential in the political landscape: 14.38% in the 1988 presidential election, 15% in the 1995 presidential election, 16.86% in 2002. That year, Jean-Marie Le Pen qualified for the second round. . A « choc » for the left, eliminated (16.18% for Lionel Jospin). With a question in the background: did he really want to conquer and exercise power, or was he satisfied with his role as a protesting tribune?
Jean-Marie Le Pen during the FN convention in Lyon, February 2002. / Antonio Ribeiro/Gamma Rapho
In the European elections of 1984 and the legislative elections of 1986, the FN attracted a radicalized opposition electorate, seduced by its discourse which was both security (reestablishment of the death penalty) and economically liberal (removal of income tax). . At the same time, right-wing notables were moving closer to the far-right party. Until Jean-Marie Le Pen’s remarks on September 13, 1987, to the RTL Grand Jury-The Worldon gas chambers, “details of the history of the Second World War”. Any national rapprochement of the right with it therefore becomes impossible, despite some local hesitations until the regional elections of 1998.
It is difficult to disentangle what was a strategy of provocation or the expression of his deep convictions. In any case, his shocking remarks earned him several convictions for negationism (apology for war crimes and contestation of crimes against humanity) or for racism (provocation to hatred, discrimination and racial violence). . And in fact, his essentialist philosophy with racialist overtones irrigates his Memoirsfor example when he declares in particular that “the white world is dying” due to a “great replacement wanted and organized”.
Suspected of abuse of weakness
His private life, like his political life, has a dark side around the legacy of the cement maker Hubert Lambert (known as Saint-Julien). This member of the FN, who died in 1976, is at the origin of the personal fortune of Jean-Marie Le Pen, including the Montretout estate in Saint-Cloud (Hauts-de-Seine). The president of the National Front was suspected of abusing his weakness to capture this inheritance, although the affair ended with an amicable agreement with the Lambert family, as well as of tax fraud for having concealed a fraction of it from the foreigner.
Over time, the National Front became a “family front”. The Le Pen family was marked very early on by the public commitment of Jean-Marie, married in June 1960 to Pierrette Lalanne. On November 2, 1976, their daughters, Marie-Caroline (born in January 1960), Yann (November 1963) and Marine (August 1968), were in their apartment when their building was blown up by a bomb. In October 1984, Jean-Marie Le Pen was left by his wife who followed his biographer (the divorce was finalized in 1987). She will pose dressed in a single maid’s apron in Playboythen ran for the 1986 legislative elections under the label of a dissident movement.
The three girls will join the FN, where they will find the men of their lives. The eldest, Marie-Caroline, however, left the clan to follow Bruno Mégret’s split in 1998. The trigger for the break was also of a family nature: Jean-Marie Le Pen announced that, if he was declared ineligible for the 1999 European elections, the head of the list would be Jany Paschos, whom he married in 1991. A real declaration of war against the “number two” who saw himself as one day succeed at the head of a modernized and professionalized training. “There is only one number in the FN, it’s number one”insists Jean-Marie Le Pen. A principle that will hold true until he finds an heir in his own family.
Ups and downs with Marine Le Pen
In January 2011, Marine Le Pen succeeded him as party president. Family preference prevailed: the father supported his younger daughter rather than Bruno Gollnisch, with whom he had more ideological affinities. Jean-Marie Le Pen is not leaving political life, however, since he becomes honorary president.
Marine Le Pen succeeding her father at the head of the FN, at the party congress in Tours, in January 2011. / Cyril Chigot
His presence will nevertheless thwart the desire to “demonize” the new number one. In 2015, at the traditional May 1 parade, Jean-Marie Le Pen shouted “Jeanne, help!” » in front of the statue at Place des Pyramides, in Paris. He then goes up to the podium, just before Marine Le Pen’s speech, raising his arms in victory. It’s too much. Between the Le Pens, the war is no longer just cold. In the 2017 legislative elections, the father will even sponsor candidacies competing with those of the FN.
At the time of his death, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s political legacy was twofold. On the one hand, he still remains present in the National Front – which became the National Rally – through the surname Le Pen. On the other hand, its provocations and its extremism have continued further since the 2022 presidential election through Éric Zemmour, new electoral and media representative of the hardest extreme right.
