The Anti-Communism That Fueled Jean-Marie Le Pen
After the Axis powers’ defeat in World War II, many former Nazis and Vichyites recycled themselves as anti-communists. Jean-Marie Le Pen sought to rally such forces with radicalized conservatives in a common front against the red peril.
Far-right French politician Jean-Marie Le Pen and his daughter Marine Le Pen visit the historic site of the 1792 Battle of Valmy on September 20, 2006. (Alain Julien / AFP via Getty Images)
Retrospectives on Jean-Marie Le Pen highlight his most infamous racist and antisemitic statements but almost uniformly overlook a key dimension of his politics: anti-communism. Yet this has long been a decisive focus for the far right, inseparable from its overall struggle for the preservation of a white, Western civilization. Anti-Marxism has often been the common denominator of reactionary groups, as is well embodied by Le Pen’s own career of alliance making.
Throughout his life, whether in Vietnam or in France’s National Assembly, Le Pen was convinced that he was fighting Bolshevism and its avatars, be they student unionists, Algerian independence fighters, or left-wing party activists. Le Pen never lost sight of his main objective: to tear down his supreme enemies, namely the French Communist Party (PCF) and the Soviet Union. For some seventy-five years, Le Pen was a red-baiting anti-communist.
Purge
Jean-Marie Le Pen was born into a modest Breton family. His family was neither fundamentally extremist nor involved in Nazi collaboration. It was when he went to Paris in 1948 that the young student became politicized. A fighter by nature, Le Pen quickly fell in with the most right-wing student circles, for a time associating with Action Française. This far-right league, with its roots in nineteenth-century revanchism, survived the purge of collaborators but lost its vast prewar cultural influence.
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