More than a week after his death, a religious ceremony in tribute to Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of the National Front, is organized at 11 a.m. this Thursday, January 16, in Paris. Customary of racist and xenophobic outings, the politician had a physical characteristic known to all: he had one eye missing, the left. And that was good, because the left has never been a passion.
Jean-Marie Le Pen has long asserted that he had lost the use of his eye during a fight, sometimes adding that he was defending “an Arab friend”. A version contradicted by Alain Jamet, his traveling companion. According to him, he lost it during a debate and because of rough security which threw them to the ground. When he got up, he discovered a bulging eye. Having been kicked in the face, his eye hung on his cheekbone. He then put it back into the orbit himself, before heading to a pharmacy to get treatment and returning to the forefront in “not even bad” mode. But this story was completely invented.
Mallet hit in the face
The reality is much less heroic. And it was the person himself who ended up admitting it, in 2018, in his memoirs.
Return to 1965. Jean-Marie Le Pen is campaign director of Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour, far-right presidential candidate. He then took care of everything. And that day, in Hyères (Var), it was he who set up the marquee for a meeting. By wielding a mallet to drive a sardine into the ground, like at a campsite, he accidentally pokes himself in the eye.
Diagnosis: retinal detachment and vitreous hemorrhage. Despite an operation, he lost his eye. To protect him, because he remains painful and sensitive to light, he decides to wear a blindfold, giving him a pirate side of politics, which he liked. He ended up abandoning this blindfold in favor of a more discreet glass eye. This is a first step in the demonization of the National Front.
“You give me back my eye, I give you back your mother”
But the troubles linked to this accident are not over for Jean-Marie Le Pen. Because his glass eye caused him a mishap during his divorce with Pierrette, Marine’s mother.
This is the journalist from ParisianOlivier Baumont, who tells it in a book. We are in 1986 and the two ex-spouses are at war in public. We remember, in particular, Pierrette Le Pen posing naked in Playboy. And to further annoy the father of her children, she will take her spare glass eye with her.
-When Jean-Marie Le Pen is elected to the Assembly, he begins to stress. Because if his usual glass eye comes loose in the middle of a session, he absolutely needs a backup one. In his misfortune, the politician is nevertheless lucky: his former wife forgot something when leaving the marital home: the funeral urn with his mother’s ashes. “You give me back my eye, I give you back your mother”he threatens her. The deal is accepted and the exchange is then done through lawyers.
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