Since the death of Jean-Marie Le Pen on January 7, many personalities have paid tribute to him. “A fighter” for the Prime Minister, François Bayrou. A “visionary” for the president of the National Rally (RN), Jordan Bardella. As if the old far-right leader, co-founder of the National Front in 1972, had changed in his last years, turning his back on a life of racism and anti-Semitism… And yet, this was not the case: Le Pen n never stopped being Le Pen; there is no question, in his eyes, of fitting into the mold of the normalization so desired by his daughter Marine. The World can attest to this: between 2018 and 2022, we met him around twenty times in total, at the Montretout manor, in his villa in Rueil-Malmaison (Hauts-de-Seine), in La Trinité-sur-Mer (Morbihan ) or in a hotel in Jungholtz (Haut-Rhin). Regular interviews, recorded with his consent, which show Jean-Marie Le Pen as he has always been: homophobic, racist, anti-Semitic.
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Among the multitude of subjects discussed, only one sometimes triggers his anger: “his” Algerian war. The old para of 1is foreign parachute regiment of the Foreign Legion had recognized, in November 1962 in the newspaper Combatto have “tortured because it had to be done”. He then denied it for the rest of his life, despite the accumulation of evidence: testimonies from victims collected in the early 1980s by The Chained Duck et Liberationthen, in 2002, a damning investigation by Monde revealing the existence of a dagger engraved with the name “JM Le Pen, 1is REP »left at the scene of the assassination of Ahmed Moulay, tortured by paratroopers in 1957. Jean-Marie Le Pen had lost his trial for defamation against the daily.
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