Aith the death of Jean-Marie Le Pen on Tuesday January 7, at the age of 96, one of the most controversial political figures of the last seventy years has passed away. Everything in the career of this native of La Trinité-sur-Mer (Morbihan), marked young by poverty and the lack of a father, is a matter of controversy and scandal: his behavior during the Algerian war, where, according to solid testimonies, he indulged in torture – a practice which he subsequently defended –, his anti-Semitic declarations, his taste for punches, his clan spirit, the conditions in which he, the son of a sailor , East became chatelain, on the occasion of a controversial legacy, installing in the domain of Montretout, on the heights of Saint-Cloud (Hauts-de-Seine) the Le Pen clan, whose more than eventful history resembles that of the Atrides…
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Elected deputy in 1956, at the age of 27, under the banner of Pierre Poujade’s party, engaged with the paratroopers to defend French Algeria, whose disappearance he deplored all his life, this political adventurer could have wasting away with the IVe Republic by denouncing de Gaulle as well as the left. He managed to rise from his ashes under the Veusing all the facets of his personality and the opportunities that presented themselves to him to make the far right prosper, until this thunderbolt of April 21, 2002 when, to general amazement, his face was revealed as that of one of the two finalists in the presidential election.
Unvarnished cynicism
A Trumpist character before his time, without filter or superego, Jean-Marie Le Pen knew how to sense before others and shamelessly exploit the fears which torment the working and middle classes in the era of globalization: immigration and insecurity, the specter of downgrading, at the cost of unvarnished cynicism, because the more he multiplied the attacks against “the system”, the more he became one of its cogs.
His achievement is to have succeeded in transforming a name into a brand, at the end of a career made up of brilliant coups, crossings of the desert and fratricidal wars (such as the fight against the number two of the FN Bruno Mégret, in 1998 ). But this brand is eminently poisonous, as its creator has gone so far into anti-Semitism (“Durafour crematorium”), revisionism (“the gas chambers are a detail in the history of the Second World War”), racism (“the Roma who, like birds, fly in their natural state”), complacency towards National Socialism (“in “national socialism”, there is “socialism””).
All the efforts undertaken, notably in 2015, by Marine Le Pen to marginalize her father and attempt to demonize the legacy, at the cost of a grueling political and judicial standoff, will do nothing. Even renamed “National Rally” instead of “National Front”, with a more popular and less right-wing orientation, Marine Le Pen’s party remains marked with the seal of the extreme right, in the long shadow of its founder. The behavior of several RN candidates during the last legislative elections showed how fragile the veneer was.
And it is not Jordan Bardella’s reactions to the death of the patriarch that will remove the doubt. Like many party executives, the president of the RN did not feel the need to practice the right of inventory. He did not sort out the balance sheet, praising the action of a man who “has always served France, defended its identity and its sovereignty”, In “the French army in Indochina and Algeria”. Jean-Marie Le Pen may be dead, but he is still here.
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