What happens to a “Man of Destiny” when he fails to fulfil his destiny? This second volume of former National Front (FN) leader Jean-Marie Le Pen’s autobiography provides a curious portrait of a fallen demagogue in his dotage. Following his expulsion from the FN in 2015, Le Pen has become an increasingly marginal and eccentric figure, his political role essentially reduced to trolling his daughter Marine, the new leader of the party, which she renamed the Rassemblement national in 2018.

This book, which might well be titled “Oedipus Wrecks,” deals with the period spanning the formation of the FN, its emergence as a national political force, and Le Pen’s subsequent expulsion by his daughter. Much of the rambling, poorly edited text is devoted to this rift, but Le Pen also addresses accusations that he is a fascist, an antisemite, a liar, and a racist.

Volume One presented the author as a Boys’ Own–style hero destined for glory, a Breton Huckleberry Finn with an ambiguous relationship to the wartime Vichy regime and the resistance. The second volume opens with a hubristic comparison between the author and Charles de Gaulle: Le Pen claims to have spent his life pursuing the national unity that evaded De Gaulle. It soon becomes clear, then, that we are dealing with a man who has almost no self-awareness, a would-be national savior who cannot even achieve unity with his own daughters.