“Engaged under the uniform of the French army in Indochina and Algeria, tribune of the people in the National Assembly (…) he has always served France”, writes Jordan Bardella upon the announcement of the death of the former president of the National Front. Mohamed Moulay, witness to the murder of his father on March 2, 1957 in the casbah of Algiers by the young lieutenant of the 1is REP Jean-Marie Le Pen, could answer him.
Even though the latter never admitted this crime, his dagger nevertheless testified for him, marked with his name on the sheath, left there, found and exposed 46 years later before the judges. Although he never formally admitted to having tortured, Le Pen, on the other hand, never denied a commitment to the service of French Algeria placed at the center of his life and his fight, the source of a cult of violence and of atavistic racism. Wondering in November 1962 in the newspaper Combat what torture was, he thus saw in “the beatings, the gegene and the bathtub (…) no mutilation, nothing that affects the integrity” nor condemned those who practiced them.
The matrix of his commitment
The Algerian years therefore constituted the matrix of his journey, a brutal founding experience in the making of the far-right politician. The centurion soldier of the colonial wars leaves for Algeria because he was unable to fight in time in Indochina. The war saw the student activist engage in politics. Elected from the Poujadist movement against a backdrop of destabilization of the republic, the young deputy enlisted in October 1956. An officer during the battle of Algiers in January 1957, he practiced torture. As early as June 1962, the historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet published in Truth-Freedom a report from police commissioner Gilles stationed in Algiers with the complaint against lieutenant Jean-Marie Le Pen of a 19-year-old Abdenour Yahiaoui kidnapped by the 1is REP on March 8, 1957.
The Algerian heritage commanded his subsequent political action. Jean-Marie Le Pen then never stopped regretting French Algeria, “the bullshit of 1962”, he said. Man from Tixier-Vignancourt, the former OAS lawyer candidate in the 1965 presidential election, he led the campaign. Seven years later, the bet of a “National Front for French Unity” was largely based on the choice of rallying all the dispersed currents of the extreme right on the basis of French Algeria. A persistent “nostalgia” has indeed constituted an essential cog in the thinking of the FN. Surrounded by a host of former OAS members, the man retained a lasting hatred of the Algerians which went back to the Algerian War, reproaching them for their lasting refusal to be French.
Far from the point of detail
Torture was therefore not a point of detail in the history of Jean-Marie Le Pen even though the time of justice is neither that of memory nor that of historians. Benefiting from the amnesty voted in March 1962, he systematically brought the case to court when historians have carried out the investigation until today (Fabrice Riceputi, Le Pen and torture. Algiers 1957, history against oblivionThe Illegal Passenger, 2024). Brought to admit to an officially illegal practice in France from 1954 to 1962, Le Pen never admitted to having tortured himself, even going so far as to deny the interview in which he said in November 1962 that he had “nothing to hide [car] we tortured because we had to.”
Undoubtedly anxious to cast a veil of respectability at the dawn of a political career, J.-M. Le Pen belatedly initiated defamation suits in the 1980s against all those who claimed that he had tortured, former Prime Minister Michel Rocard finally acquitted on appeal in 1997 Chained duck titled since 1985 on “Mr. without embarrassment, easy to torture”.
Without ever having contradicted the very usefulness of torture, he spoke again in 1984 during The moment of truththe first general public program to which he was invited, the “necessary obligations imposed by the military and political hierarchy”. We therefore had to wait until the 2000s and the lawsuit brought by the newspaper The World to see torture publicly proven following the long detailed investigation of Florence Beaugé, acquitted in 2003 before the 17e indictment chamber.
Testimonies and traces
Yes, Jean-Marie Le Pen was indeed a torturer. If the archives are sometimes silent, there still remain testimonies and traces, both from Algerians who were victims but also from those close to Jean-Marie Le Pen and companions in torture, like J .-M. Demarquet, another elected Poujadist engaged in 1956.
Thus, for around twenty years, journalistic investigations and the work of historians (Raphaëlle Branche, Sylvie Thénault, Alain Ruscio, etc.), have highlighted the mechanisms of torture, bringing to light a truth that Le Pen -even had recognized during the Algerian war.
