Death of Jean-Marie Le Pen: between the father and his daughters, a family tragedy

Jean-Marie le Pen died. Major and controversial figure of the V^e République, the man who put the far right back at the heart of French politics died this Tuesday, January 7 at the age of 96 in Garches (Hauts-de-Seine), “surrounded by his family,” his family said in a press release. . Elected Poujadist deputy at the age of 27 under the Fourth Republic, he fought against de Gaulle, Pierre Mendès France, François Mitterrandwill have managed to qualify to everyone’s surprise in the second round of the presidential election against Jacques Chirac in 2002, before facing five years later Nicolas Sarkozy. Who else has achieved such longevity? The “Menhir” leaves an indelible mark on political life with its excesses, its racist, anti-Semitic or homophobic outings. He has been convicted more than thirty times, notably for contesting crimes against humanity and inciting discrimination.
The history of France that he marked is intertwined with his personal history. For the July 2015 issue of Vanity Fair, Claude Askolovitch had precisely focused on an intimate aspect of Jean-Marie Le Pen which allowed us to better understand the public man. The story of his relationship with his daughters, including Marine Le Penthe heiress to an extraordinary family saga.

What they were ready to do for him before, do we have any idea? I remember a scene of the love of a Le Pen daughter for her father. It was in 2007, at the end of the presidential campaign, at the Equinoxe salons, near the Aquaboulevard in Paris, where the already old devil – 78 years old at the time – had gathered his people for the first round. A discomfited crowd had received failure: Sarkozy had siphoned votes from the National Front until elimination. Among the activists, class friends of a still unknown high school student, Marion Maréchaldanced to the sound of cartoon credits, Captain Flama favorite piece of young lepénistes. In a private room, Yann Maréchal, youngest daughter of Jean-Marie and mother of Marion, organizer of party events, a thin woman with the air of a tired bird, advances towards a massive man, black and bearded, who parades among the VIPs and which is repugnant to him. ” Sir ? » The man stares at her. “I hate what you say. I have a lot of Jewish friends. I hate what you say about Jews. But you are with my father one evening when things are not going well for him and I came to shake your hand. » It was Dieudonné she greeted like that and those who know her know that it was no small thing. Yann from parties and nightclubs, Yann the windsurfer from Club Med, Yann the blonde from the Apocalypse, the fashionable club of golden-swarthy young people from Feujs and Arabs, Yann who would have liked to be something other than the host fest-noz of the extreme right but who was that too, doing things out of filial love that were unlike him.

Would she do it again now? Would she still feel disgust for him? She passed 50 and almost died of cancer. She is in remission, divorced, became a grandmother – through Marion who is an MP, her pride, her revenge and who embodies the promising future of the ultras. Yann is all that is left of a family in tatters of which she is a witness and a prisoner. She alone (or almost) still lives in the Saint-Cloud property where the life and dislocation of her family played out, on the second floor of a large Second Empire building in the heart of the Parc de Showalljust above his father’s old office which offers a breathtaking view of Paris and where time freezes memories and resentments.

I saw again Yann Le Pen in spring. She spoke in funny and hurt words, and would not want everything to be told. When she was little, she swore to herself that she would never do or say anything that would harm her family – but is it a family at all? Yann is one of three Le Pen girls and the last one left. It has been seventeen years since her older sister, Marie-Caroline, ran away. It’s Marine’s turn now, whose breakup with her father is making the headlines. Yann understands everything and doesn’t hold a grudge against anyone. She was the only one to visit Jean-Marie when he was urgently hospitalized, in the middle of a political-family psychodrama, because of blocked arteries and a pulmonary complication. She is at odds with Marine but for other reasons. She still works and sometimes wonders why her parents had children.

For the Le Pens, the beginning is abandonment and once we understand that, the story just has to unfold.

A toxic old man

At dawn on November 2, 1976, Villa Poirier, in the 15th arrondissement of Paris, three sisters were shivering with fear and stupor, wrapped in blankets in the home of neighbors they did not know. Their parents went to search the ruins of their building, blown up by 20 kg of dynamite. Here are the girls of Jean-Marie Le Pen at the time when history captures him for the first time: Marie-Caroline is 16 years old, Yann 12 and Marine 8. Of this explosion which was to eradicate their family (the attack has never been clarified), the two youngest remember this today: the father and mother came out without them, that morning; they left them again the next evening to have dinner with friends, to cheer themselves up instead of staying with them – Marine remembers that it was Jimmy Carter’s election day in the United States and they didn’t want to miss that. During this time, the three girls were alone in fear as they were in life: children who were not taken on vacation, who lived with their nanny in a separate apartment and who were abandoned to their comes out just after the explosion that could have killed them. “I had to do the paperwork”Jean-Marie Le Pen justified himself one day to one of them. And the mother? “I wasn’t going to leave your father alone!” »

Memory is sometimes convenient to support our choices as adults. In 2005, when she published Against the tide (Grancher éditions), his book of (young) memories and his first political manifesto, Marine Le Pen had located Villa Poirier the source of his loyalty. This father, different from the others, threatened and reprobate, she would do him justice. “I guess I’ll never be able to free myself from this fear for him.”she wrote then. Rereading it now, it also evoked a lot of loneliness – Jean-Marie was struck by it, I was told. Today, the 1976 attack remains Marine Le Pen’s first memory: what preceded the explosion has been erased from her consciousness. But he is now the testimony of something else: the strange selfishness of his parents, the mark of an abandoned childhood and the first wound that his father inflicted on him. Everything pays off in the end. In what happens to the Le Pens, politics is the pretext or the theater; it is not the primary reason.