[EDITION SPÉCIALE JMLP] JM Le Pen has died: the departure of the last of the giants

Jean-Marie Le Pen died on January 7, 2025, at the age of 96. After the deaths of Roland Dumas and Jacques Chirac, it was the last survivor of the old world; some will even say the last giant, knowing that General de Gaulle having taken his final bow, only François Mitterrand and him, Jean-Marie Le Pen, remained. Certainly, unlike the man from Jarnac, the man from Trinité-sur-Mer was never President of the Republic. Which did not prevent him, even while in eternal opposition, from always reasoning like a statesman.

Many of his peers felt they had a “ certain idea of ​​France » ; not him, for whom France was above all a reality. France, he lived it deep in his flesh. Raised in the memory of the Great War, he experienced the horrors of the Second, losing his father, a sailor who went to sea on a German mine, while he was becoming a young resistance fighter. There were then other wars, those of Indochina and Algeria, interrupted by the battle of the Suez Canal. This is what forms – more than a character – a man.

The rest of his life was nothing more than fights, political ones, but always imbued with that seriousness specific to those who experienced fire and whose bullets whizzing past their ears were not tennis balls: the only ones that its opponents, for the most part, faced in the most tragic hours of our History.

It was therefore Jean-Marie Le Pen, organizer of the Tixier-Vignancour committees, during the presidential election of 1965, matrix of what would become the National Front, in 1972, at the instigation of New Order. To the author of these lines, he confided, during an interview given to Shock of the monthin June 2006: “ At Tixier, I managed to bring together sensitivities a priori the most incompatible: Algerian riflemen and big bourgeois, former members of the Resistance and vanquished members of the Collaboration. I know I have been criticized for years for reaching out to these people. My resistance friends at the time already reproached me for it; yet, if I hadn’t reached out to them, who else would have? When we place ourselves in a perspective of national unity, we unite. Or, we go mussel fishing! »

For him, “the extreme right was a ball and chain”

And this eternal troublemaker adds another layer, regarding this “extreme right” of which he was so often accused of being the leader: “ I must admit that I dragged this extreme right like a real ball and chain. I was preparing for the future. They were there to try to justify their past, imagining, no doubt, that if they managed to rehabilitate their youthful errors, the national right, in factwould find himself at the gates of power. A perfectly idiotic reasoning. »

Why reproduce this interview, which caused a lot of noise at the time, even in the ranks of the Lepéniste last square, already very disturbed by the split from Bruno Mégret, in December 1998? Quite simply because on this occasion, the deceased truly revealed the depths of his thoughts and showed himself as he was, on the garden side, far from journalists who only wished him well. It is the same Jean-Marie Le Pen who, in 1974, made immigration the new battlehorse of a nascent National Front, while his friends persisted in considering anti-communism as the end of all ends. Similarly, in 1990, he went against the grain by speaking out against the first Gulf War, although in the circumstances, he was more than in the minority within his own political office.

Annoy the bourgeois…

So was Jean-Marie Le Pen. Who would never have exchanged his freedom of spirit for all the leather goods in the world, persisting in not denying his crazy years of youth during which he exchanged blows with the communists in order to better, and later, drink with them. Happy period during which he showed his ass to the bourgeois with the filmmaker Claude Chabrol, one of his famous friends and, incidentally, one of the leaders of the New Wave. Where he bravely suggested to one of Pigalle’s godfathers that he become the godfather of his youngest, Marine. Where he enjoyed defying the oceans on his boat, not named Cambronne for nothing, rather than being bored at posh dinners. In short, where, while being Le Pen, he was simply and above all Jean-Marie. What the author of these lines has been able to verify on numerous occasions, with the help of dozens of interviews and two works written by four hands: man’s word et The Le Pen Albumduring the presidential campaign of 2002, the year in which he made the priests of right-thinking tremble and the Diafoirus force-feeding the French people with great moralizing blows. Piss off the bourgeois? It was for the deceased, more than a guideline, a breviary from which he never turned away.

This sad day in January 2025, it is therefore both Le Pen and Jean-Marie who are being buried. Lovers of France today all feel a little orphaned.