the essential
Jean-Marie Le Pen died at 96. The far-right political leader lost the use of his left eye in 1965, forcing him to wear a blindfold. Several versions have long circulated about the origin of the loss of his eye.
Jean-Marie Le Pen only saw one eye. A mutilated look since 1965. The origin of his disability in his left eye remained a mystery for years. The former vice-president of the FN Alain Jamet in the early 2010s assured that Jean-Marie Le Pen had lost the use of his eye during a brawl during a meeting. This is not the case.
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Jean-Marie Le Pen himself lifted the veil in his memoirs in 2018. It was not a fight that was the cause of the loss of his eyeball but a simple accident. In 1965, Jean-Marie Le Pen campaigned for the far-right candidate Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour. While setting up a marquee, he injured himself with a mallet. “In Hyères, while wielding the mallet to drive a sardine where the tension ropes are attached, I got a shock in my eye, I had to be hospitalized,” he wrote in his book “S”.
The operation is a failure
At the time, Jean-Marie Le Pen consulted a specialist in Lyon where he went blindfolded on the arm of his first wife Pierrette. The surgeon operates on him. But the operation was a failure: he lost the use of his left eye.
For several years, the founder of the National Front wore a blindfold to hide his eye, protect it from the light on television sets but also make it “a very important element of identification”, explained to Monde in 2022 Lorrain de Saint-Affrique, advisor to the far-right leader for 40 years. In the 80s, Jean-Marie Le Pen replaced the headband with a prosthesis before wearing glasses as he got older.
“Painful physically and psychologically”
Jean-Marie Le Pen returned to the loss of his eye in an interview with Public Senate in 2015. “The eye is an element of apprehension of reality, we do not see in the same way with one eye as with two, and in particular in depth, there is an effect of perspective that we do not have and to which we must readjust.”
