Good Riddance, Jean-Marie Le Pen
At his life’s end, Jean-Marie Le Pen had been expelled from the party that he helped found. Yet this Holocaust denier and former torturer left behind an important legacy: making the far right into a major force in French political life.
Jean-Marie Le Pen attends a meeting at the Maison de la Mutualité in Paris on November 7, 1972. (Alain Nogues / Sygma via Getty Images)
In 1987, Jean-Marie Le Pen managed to have a photo taken of himself shaking Ronald Reagan’s hand at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). By all accounts Reagan hadn’t specifically agreed to meet the Front National leader and didn’t choose to “endorse” him; a National Security Council source told Le Monde that it was “mystified” by how it had even happened. But the image allowed Le Pen to sell the idea that he — a mere fisherman’s son, often called a far-right extremist — had achieved the confidence of the US president.
Le Pen’s self-presentation in this period jars with accounts of an intransigent “populist” party, a “neither left nor right” force, said to have only more recently sought mainstream legitimacy under his daughter Marine. Already in the 1980s, the Front National founder sought to conquer space on the Right through a hard anti-immigration line, the commitment to “law and order,” and an overt admiration of Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. The party railed against a supposed Marxist hegemony in French politics, the better to assert itself as “the Right that dares speak its name.”
In part inspired by the example of the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI) across the Alps, Le Pen’s record was that of a figure who united various fascist, nationalist, and colonial-nostalgic subcultures and made them into an electoral party able to set broader political dividing lines. If admiration for the Axis powers of World War II persisted among its activist base — and continues to raise its head in the party still today — it built its support with a more present-day message, fusing a language of national decline with warnings of immigrant threat.
This enterprise was helped along by mainstream politics in three distinct ways. First — and most widely discussed — was the social despair in deindustrialized, blue-collar France that pushed parts of it toward voting for the Front National, or at least no longer voting for the Left. Yet there was also a more insidious promotion of Le Pen under the Socialist president François Mitterrand in the 1980s, as the government cynically drove his visibility in the effort to split the Right. Added to this is a convergence of conservative and even liberal parties around obsessions of Islamophobia and civilizational decline, in turn encouraging their base — as Le Pen put it — to “vote for the original and not the copy.”
Chameleonic
From his first election as an MP in 1956 until his expulsion from the Front National in 2015, Le Pen adopted often-chameleonic positions, marrying the different souls of French nationalism and the particular requirements of opposing the governments of the day. The distinctly “economic liberal” line of 1970s and 1980s, in opposition to François Mitterrand’s center-left — a program for business freedom that Le Pen called his “manual of counterrevolution”— was allied with more protectionist positions, or at least ones that would grant “preference” to French nationals, in public services as in market competition. Most emblematic was the appeal to blue-collar workers on the grounds that each immigrant meant an unemployed Frenchman.
Le Pen had first been elected to parliament in 1956 as a young Poujadist, i.e., a follower of the anti-tax movement led by shopkeeper Pierre Poujade. While this short-lived current is often taken as an example of “economic populism” — the appeal to the interests of small-town businesses overridden by modernization and corporate giants — Le Pen’s part of the far right constantly shifted in search of different electorates. In 1965, he worked on the presidential campaign of Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour, an ex-Vichyite who had been legal counsel to Louis-Ferdinand Céline, and whose union of nationalist and neofascist forces drew a distinctly bourgeois vote, as well as many pieds-noirs, i.e., “Europeans” returning to France from Algeria.
While the Front National was a marginal force in the first decade after its creation in 1972, it really began to gain headway under Mitterrand’s presidency in the 1980s. As Ugo Palheta writes in a penetrating account of the party and the authoritarian turn in French politics more widely, this owed not simply to left-wing voters decamping to the Front National, as if out of disappointment at Mitterrand’s record on jobs and welfare, but also to its posture as a harder right-wing force than the Gaullist party, with which it only sporadically made electoral alliances. It could thus peel off from the more established right “small employers (shopkeepers, artisans, farmers) and parts of the workforce hostile to the Left and the labour movement.”
In the 1990s, Le Pen’s positions shifted toward a greater critique of globalization and indeed the Maastricht Treaty that founded the European Union, despite his earlier support for the European project. Still, his party retained a strong core critique of French statism and high taxation, making Le Pen into an early supporter of a steep increase in the retirement age. His appeal to working-class voters, even those disillusioned with the Left, was not simply a call for social protections, but rather a vision of “security” based on defending “the French” from immigration and cultural decline. This was what he called a “socially left-wing, economically right-wing, nationally French” agenda.
Le Pen’s breakthrough in the first round of the 2002 presidential election, earning him a runoff against Jacques Chirac, still stands today as a threshold moment in French political history. Back then, a strong mobilization ahead of the second round saw a near-80-percent turnout, in which over four-fifths of those who actually voted chose “the crook, not the fascist.” Le Pen would never be the figure able to take the final step toward power. He did at least succeed in pushing the wider political debate to the right, notably through the adoption of many of his talking points by Gaullist candidate Nicolas Sarkozy ahead of the 2007 presidential election.
Stink
Many obituaries upon Le Pen’s death will compile a list of his offensive and outrageous statements, most infamous the reference to the Nazi gas chambers as a “detail of history” or his praise for Vichyite leader Marshal Philippe Pétain. Yet worse among his crimes was his record as a torturer of Algerian prisoners, when he took a break from his parliamentary agitation to serve in France’s colonial war. These references add to an understandable image of Le Pen as an archreactionary, backward-looking figure. This impression is heightened by the long history of Nazi associations he detailed in his recent volumes of memoir and his rancor against his daughter. Yet even in death, Le Pen is more than a bad smell from a now-concluded past.
Not just under Sarkozy or current president Emmanuel Macron, but since the 1980s, the French public arena has become increasingly obsessed with questions of identity and the cultural threat presented by immigration. This inflects even economic issues like homeowners’ opposition to social housing, imagined to be allotted to immigrants rather than those “of French stock.” If not a figure of far-right lineage like Le Pen, even a purportedly normal center-right politician like Chirac could make a pitch for his base by denouncing the “noise and stink” caused by immigrants and publicly question why “Jean-Marie Le Pen should have a monopoly on emphasizing the real problems.”
Le Pen would later in life question the “detoxification” pursued by his daughter Marine, at least insofar as he — expelled from the party in 2015 — became a victim of the party’s quest to renew its image. Surely it does not need all his ideological baggage in order to bid for electoral success. Yet amplified by billionaire-owned media outlets like CNews, the essential anti-immigrant and declinist thrust of Le Pen’s message has clearly been mainstreamed, and his party is ever closer to power. This owes not just to a watering down of the far right’s ambitions, like dropping its short-lived call to leave the European Union, but a “toxification” of much of the rest of the political field.
More than two decades after Jean-Marie Le Pen made the second round of the 2002 election, it seems hard to imagine a similarly strong voter mobilization against the Rassemblement National today. Increasingly volatile electoral turnout, the Left’s much-enfeebled ability to rely on blue-collar supporters, and the banalization of the Le Pen family party make the “republican front” ever more precarious. That the current prime minister, the liberal François Bayrou, marked Le Pen’s death by crediting him as a “fighter” for his cause — boasting that he would dispense with the “polemics” that Le Pen himself favored — illustrates this coming-to-terms with the far right.
Le Pen was indeed a fighter for his cause, from the torture cells of Algiers to his perches in various parliaments. As left-wing leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon wrote in response to the news of the Front National founder’s death, piety for the dead does not take away the right to criticize his actions, in Le Pen’s case as a war criminal and convicted Holocaust denier. “The fight against the man is over. The fight against the hatred, racism, Islamophobia, and antisemitism he has spread continues.”