During his career, the founder of the National Front, who died on Tuesday at the age of 96, made many openly revisionist, racist or homophobic remarks, before the demonization of the party started by his daughter Marine in the 2010s.
“A nice National Front is of no interest to anyone”he estimated in 2017 in The Point. Died Tuesday January 7 at the age of 96, Jean Marie Le Pen increased verbal excesses throughout his long political career. His statements have earned him numerous convictions, notably for contesting crimes against humanity. On the occasion of the disappearance of the former president of the FN, France 2 returned to this facet of the far-right leader.
As early as 1958, when he was a young MP, Jean-Marie Le Pen told the former head of government Pierre Mendès France: “You are aware that you crystallize in your character a certain number of patriotic and almost physical repulsions”. However, evenfter the founding of the flame party in 1972, the echo of his remarks remained confidential, like the scores of the National Front. Everything changed in the 1980s, with the electoral breakthrough of the FN, notably in the legislative elections of 1986, with 35 deputies elected to the National Assembly thanks to the temporary transition to proportional representation.
In September 1987, his vision of the Nazi policy of extermination of Jews caused a scandal. “I ask myself a certain number of questions and I am not saying that the gas chambers did not exist, but I believe that it is a detail in the history of the Second World War”he says on the RTL set. A formula that he will use several times.
This outing was followed by another equally controversial one a few months later, about Michel Durafour, then Minister of the Civil Service. “Mr. Durafour crematory”he said at a meeting in September 1988. This sinister play on words caused a scandal and earned him the lifting of his parliamentary immunity and a fine of 10,000 francs for public insult. In 1998, Jean-Marie Le Pen and his number two in the FN at the time, Bruno Mégret, were also ordered to pay damages to the Union of Jewish Students of France (UEJF), for comments on “racial inequality” held in 1996 and 1997.
His accession to the second round of the presidential election against Jacques Chirac, in the spring of 2002, did not lessen his desire to shock through his declarations. In 2005, he declared to the far-right magazine Rivarol that the German occupation was not “particularly inhumane”. “What is scandalous about this statement?”he pretends to ask France Télévisions. He was then sentenced again for contesting crimes against humanity, this time to a three-month suspended prison sentence and a fine of 10,000 euros, in 2012 on appeal.
He reiterated in 2008, with the magazine Bretonsin an interview which he did not authorize to be published. To journalists who reminded him of the deportation process, he replied: “But that’s because you believe in that. I don’t feel obliged to adhere to that vision. I note that at Auschwitz there was the IG Farben factory, that there was 80,000 workers who worked there were not gassed or burned in any case.
A few years later, now without an executive mandate at the head of the FN, Jean-Marie Le Pen caused a new scandal with the play on words he made about artists engaged against the National Front, and in particular about Patrick Bruel, Jewish singer. “That doesn’t surprise me… We’ll make a batch next time”he says in his logbook, in 2014. Tried for provoking racial hatred, he was acquitted on appeal in December 2022.
During his life, the leader of the French far right targeted many communities that were often discriminated against, such as the Roma or Muslims. For example, he was fined 10,000 euros on appeal for inciting racial hatred in 2005. In a newspaper interview The Worldin 2003, he said: “The day we have no longer 5 million but 25 million Muslims in France, they will be in charge. And the French will tear down the walls, go down the sidewalks and lower their eyes.” In 2014, he was fined 5,000 euros on appeal for saying in 2012 that the Roma, “like birds, (fly) naturally”.
Jean-Marie Le Pen also attacked the homosexual community, strongly affected in the 1980s by the explosion of AIDS, with numerous homophobic remarks. “I believe that AIDS, I use that word, it’s a neologism which is not very beautiful, but I don’t know any other… it’s a kind of leper”he dares about a person who would be contagious “by his perspiration, his tears and his saliva”. In his mouth, sexual orientation becomes an insult, as when he pursued a political opponent in Mantes-la-Jolie (Yvelines), in May 1997. “I’m going to make you run! You’re going to see the redhead over there! Huh, p…”
Here again, the founder of the National Front continues his excesses after his withdrawal from the presidency of the party, at the beginning of the 2010s. He thus insults Florian Philippot, former number 2 of the Frontist apparatus, by repeatedly mocking his homosexuality. Other LGBT+ people are also targeted when he denounces the role of “heterophobic mafia” of the party.
A regular in the courts, where he attacked those who likened him to a Nazi, Jean-Marie Le Pen has never regretted a single one of these scandalous sentences. On the contrary, in 2015, he reiterated that, in his opinion, the gas chambers were “a detail of history”. For Marine Le Pen, who succeeded him, it was one slip-up too many. That year, the founder of the National Front was excluded for the first time.
