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.

Le Pen thus instead devoted himself to student associations and purging left-wing union members, even if this meant frequent violence: “When I arrived in the Latin Quarter, all the corpos [student unions] were in communist hands. The law corpo was the first to break free,” he later boasted. As head of the students’ representative association at this conservative faculty, Le Pen built up a large address book, far beyond the enfeebled postwar far right: the France of the time tilted left, with PCF the biggest party on 28 percent of the vote.

Le Pen was not alone in his concern. The “cement” of anti-communism aided his contribution to a reordering of the French far right, in this era fragmented among many tendencies (from collaborationists to former nationalist Resistance fighters). In 1951, for example, he was in charge of the security detail for the Pétainist Jacques Isorni at a heated campaign rally. Isorni, a former lawyer for Philippe Pétain, was elected to the National Assembly as a member of the National Center of Independents and Peasants (CNIP), an anti-Gaullist right-wing coalition. This broad movement ranged from ex-Vichyites to liberals like Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and allowed Le Pen to make profitable contacts. Amid the Korean War, such figures were preparing for an escalation of hostilities with the Soviet Union and a possible civil war with the PCF. From the outset, Le Pen skillfully positioned himself at the convergence of these hard-right currents.

The prelude to this terrible confrontation took the form of a crusade in Indochina. The National Liberation Front, led by Ho Chi Minh, was on the verge of ousting the colonial power France. Le Pen’s anti-communism was always perfectly in tune with colonialism and the defense of the French empire. As he put it in a 1974 radio broadcast: “I had the feeling that Europe and France were at war with communism. I felt called by those who bore the country’s honor.” That’s why he joined the paratroops, reaching Vietnam in 1954, shortly after the defeat at Diên Biên Phu. Like other paratroopers, he ruminated on the supposed treachery on the home front: “Frenchmen were fighting, stabbed in the back by the PCF, who were throwing the wounded from Indochina off the trains.” This kind of fable is still repeated today by the far right and veterans’ groups. It’s no coincidence that Le Pen spent a year as a propagandist for the expeditionary corps’ official newspaper, Caravelle.

Back in France, Le Pen resumed his position at the center of the reactionary right and met Pierre Poujade. This stationery shop owner had launched an anti-tax movement, which cultivated ambiguity by using populist rhetoric to rally voters. But the ambiguity was quickly dispelled. As soon as Le Pen was elected a Poujadist MP in 1956, aged just twenty-seven, he railed against the PCF, blaming it for the Indochina war. “Fascist!” the Communist benches responded in chorus. Poujade soon drifted into xenophobia and the dogged defense of French rule in Algeria (l’Algérie Française). Le Pen had the same idea in his head as he returned to the armed struggle.

Even if communists were a tiny minority within Algeria’s National Liberation Front (FLN), it’s important to understand that French colonialists saw the war against the independence fighters as a great civilizational struggle against global communism. To repress the FLN was to repel Moscow and to preserve the threatened West. This conviction remained strong among the Algérie Française nostalgists who helped found the Front National in 1972, for instance Roger Holeindre. After a detour through Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt during the Suez Crisis, paratrooper Le Pen went on the rampage in Algeria, shamelessly torturing suspects. He bragged about it in order to legitimize other torturers of his ilk in the court of public opinion. Back home, Le Pen was present at all the often-brutal demonstrations of the colonial lobby. Support for French Algeria hardened, bringing the far right back to the forefront of the political scene. In 1961, Le Pen closely supported the founding of the paramilitary Secret Army Organization (OAS) but remained cautiously aloof to avoid legal troubles. Yet he never reneged on his colonialist past.

Anti-Communist Party

Despite the demise of Poujadism, Le Pen won reelection as an MP in 1958 for the CNIP as a champion of French Algeria. But he lost this banner in 1962 with the Évian Accords on Algerian self-determination, and soon afterward his seat in the National Assembly. He could have sought a role as an establishment right-wing politician, but the CNIP’s now Gaullist line repelled him. He had loathed Charles de Gaulle ever since his alliance with the PCF in the Resistance and above all for having ceded Algeria to those he saw as the Kremlin’s Arab henchmen. In 1965, Le Pen had a short-lived boost as part of former Pétainist Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour’s presidential campaign. He became his right-hand man but dropped him when Tixier-Vignancour called for a second-round vote for the broad-left candidate François Mitterrand. This was a boundary Le Pen never crossed. A period in the wilderness followed, though he maintained his motley crew of associates.

Le Pen’s originality lay in his bid to popularize a far-right social doctrine in order to capture the working-class vote. He only managed to formulate this following in the wake of Enoch Powell, the British Conservative MP who in 1968 won over many dockworkers by playing on the racist fear of of African and Asian immigration, which was not yet known as the “great replacement.” Le Pen tried in vain to imitate PCF’s tactics, as when he launched a political record label together with an ex-Waffen-SS man, in order to compensate for the far right’s absence from the mainstream media. But this strategy didn’t work. Amid the full employment of the postwar decades, known as the Trente Glorieuses, the triumphant Gaullism of the Golden ’60s and the cultural hegemony of the Left and the unions, there was no real place for a major far-right party.

But Le Pen kept in touch with various neofascist groups, in turn linked to the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI). The MSI quickly rebuilt itself from the ashes of fascism and regained an electoral foothold, rising to 9 percent in 1972. The MSI actively supported its friends across the Alps, who took over the flame of its logo free of charge. Suitcases of cash passed between Rome and Paris. Terrorism was their main connecting thread: former OAS members took refuge in Italy and offered weapons training to the killers who carried out attacks during the Years of Lead. The neofascists were convinced that they were the vanguard of the anti-Soviet war, in the combined defense of Europe, Western civilization, and the white race. These went together, as when Holeindre explained in one of his books that communists, “being red, cannot be completely white.” This self-proclaimed “New Right” was fully in line with the strategy of tension aimed at establishing an authoritarian regime. Such a dictatorship would have aimed to repress communists and trade unionists, who had never been so influential, in Italy as in France. This maneuver was unsuccessful, but Le Pen maintained a solid relationship with his Italian counterparts, sitting together in the European Parliament from 1984.

The biggest French neofascist group was Occident, renamed Ordre Nouveau in 1969 after it was banned. It openly called for the assassination of communists, following the Greek and Indonesian examples. Its followers sought an ideological recomposition of the far right through various publications, and also to pick fights with leftist groups, notably at pro-Vietnam rallies, seriously injuring some young militants. Their motto was “to be intellectuals and violent,” as Charles Maurras had written in 1900. Several future right-wing ministers and friends of Le Pen cut their teeth in its ranks. As the 1973 elections approached, the nationalist revolutionaries wanted to create a legal and respectable shopfront for themselves, in common with the former Poujadists, Vichyists, and defenders of l’Algérie Française.

This led in 1972 to the formation of the Front National. The name referred to the 1934 gathering of nationalist leagues against the Front Populaire. As its leader, Le Pen was perceived as a moderate, a tribune, and won unanimous support among the various extreme right-wing clans, above all for his central anti-communism. This was a decisive factor for other Front National leaders, such as Waffen-SS veterans Pierre Bousquet and Léon Gaultier, who had fought against the Red Army on the Eastern Front. The Front National’s priority was to present itself as the best barrier to the Union of the Left, a “new popular front” that allegedly wanted to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat. Le Pen’s party obtained only 1 percent of the vote in 1973. Most of its neofascist cadres left, returning to their radical ways.

The Front National tried to adopt a similar party structure to the PCF, with a politburo and a central committee. Anti-communism was fundamental to its program. It identified with a corporatist “third way between class struggle and monopolies” and cast itself as the champion of the anti-Soviet struggle, like during the campaign to boycott the 1980 Moscow Olympics. But it suffered a series of setbacks and fratricidal disputes. When François Duprat, the Front National’s mastermind, was murdered in 1978 by a rival group, Le Pen, as always, blamed the “inexpiable war the Communists are waging against our country.” The indebted party survived thanks to the inheritance of a wealthy cement manufacturer, Hubert Lambert. This enabled Le Pen to keep this small concern going across the next decade amid increasing electoral success for the Union of the Left, which culminated in its victory in 1981.

To Beat the PCF

The Front National achieved its first local successes in 1982–83, when it became involved in the recomposition of a right-wing camp disoriented by the Left’s victory in 1981. The Right’s leader, Jacques Chirac, was opportunistically ambiguous, sometimes adopting a staunchly conservative (even xenophobic) stance. He did not establish a firm barrier against the newcomer Le Pen, much to the dismay of the liberal Simone Veil, who advocated the republican front (i.e., the union of all parties against the far right when it had any chance of winning elections). The traditional right cynically cited the Socialists’ alliance with the PCF in order to justify its own rapprochement with the Front National. This right-wing alliance was promoted in particular by Charles Pasqua, a key Gaullist who had long been close to a certain far right and was inspired by a sharp anti-communism.

Nevertheless, Le Pen remained largely unknown due to the media cordon sanitaire. In 1978, he denounced “the Marxist and cosmopolitan intelligentsia that rules most of the media” for boycotting him. Yet during the presidential campaign, Mitterrand had promised to uphold pluralism in the press. Le Pen jumped at the chance, wrote to him, and received his first invitations. He showed himself to be a smooth talker. His appearance on top politics talk show L’Heure de Vérité in 1984 marked the turning point, as Le Pen made his media breakthrough. During the interview, he abruptly rose to observe a minute’s silence for the “victims of communism.” This stunt caused a sensation. Such a frontal offensive against the Socialists and Communists appealed to many traditional right-wing voters. There were many new Front National members, and the media cordon sanitaire was broken. Mitterrand and Chirac were to blame, having tried to use the Front National to weaken each other. Le Pen increasingly appeared on TV and exploited polarization of the debate around questions of identity, rather than socioeconomic issues, to hammer home her xenophobic (and already clearly racist) slogans, such as the famous “One million unemployed means one million too many immigrants.” The ripple effect gave the Front National a springboard in the 1984 European elections, where it reached 11 percent.

From 1984 to 1988, Le Pen would not have been able to push home his electoral rise without the fortune of a South Korean sect fanatical about anti-communism. Reverend Sun Myung Moon saw the Indochina veteran as a champion of the cause in Europe and opened his checkbook (and address book) to him. Zealots were sent to him to serve as handymen. Le Pen presented himself as a French Ronald Reagan, embracing the neoliberalism of the Chicago Boys, and dreamed of joining Chirac’s “anti-Marxist majority” as an anti-Soviet, ultra-Atlanticist defense minister after the 1986 parliamentary elections. It was a failure, but one that didn’t dent his electoral progress, this time enabling him to overtake the Communist Party. Le Pen was surely proud of this, as he opened his victory party with these words: “The FN has achieved its first objective: to beat the PCF!” The Communists continued to give him a hard time: when Le Pen returned to his perch in the National Assembly, twenty-four years after leaving it, the Communists abandoned their seats in protest. The Front National and the PCF would later clash fiercely in the Assembly. It was mainly to combat Le Pen’s party that the Gayssot Law, named after a Communist MP, was passed in 1990, punishing Holocaust denial. The Front National was the only party to oppose this law.

Le Pen’s famous and scandalous statements, such as the revisionist 1987 claim that the gas chambers were a “detail of history,” attracted a great deal of media attention. It is interesting to note that when Le Pen made a infamous pun on a minister’s name and the Nazi crematoria in 1988 — calling him “Mr [Michel] Durafour-crématoire” — it was primarily to ridicule this centrist’s desire to ally himself with the PCF against the Front National. The most despicable antisemitism went together with anti-communism.

Le Pen tried to rally a share of the PCF’s shrinking electorate. The comedy trio Les Inconnus made fun of this in a famous sketch in which a former Communist explains his change of heart: “We founded an association to help former Communists. It has to be said that we were well helped by the FN.” According to historian Nonna Mayer, the Front National’s professionalization was achieved by imitating the PCF’s activist approach, notably under the leadership of Bruno Mégret, at the time Le Pen’s number two. A militant’s guide offered Front members practical advice about how to do propaganda work on the ground, which was not necessarily self-evident.

The supposed mass transfer of votes from the PCF to the Front National is, however, a myth. Sociologists such as Julian Mischi have shown that PCF voters largely preferred to abstain. The new Front National voters were disillusioned supporters of the classic right, whom Nicolas Sarkozy would win back for a while before only fueling the Front National’s momentum. Similarly, although blue-collar workers voted more for Le Pen, it remained a cross-class party, all the more so as France became deindustrialized. Nor does poverty explain its success: it has strongholds in both affluent and unemployment-stricken areas. As a result, the party has a broad appeal. The FN as a party of the little people is more in line with the old national-populist narrative repeated by the Le Pen family from the outset, even if some political scientists believe they see in it a so-called Le Pen leftism. The “national and popular right” that the FN wishes to embody is nothing more than a recycling of the old ethnonationalist fable of the homogeneous, organic people. It’s a brown thread that links Pétain to Jordan Bardella, the current president of the Rassemblement National. The party had never supported the social struggle in any way, as it reminded us in 1995 when it damned the “strikers of the political-unionist caste.”

Anti-Communism After the USSR

Anti-communism became less palpable with the end of the Cold War and the PCF’s setbacks. However, Le Pen’s party insistently returned to this theme, even associating it with an unabashed racism, as in 1990, when the Front National candidate in Colombes (Hauts-de-Seine) accused the PCF mayor of turning it into “a Soviet Muslim republic.” Le Pen’s focus on demonizing immigrants and racist provocations helped create a real republican front against him. The Gaullist party ceased to see the PCF and Front National as simple opposites. Chirac accepted the principle of electing left-wing MPs, even Communists, as in Gardanne (Bouches-du-Rhône) in 1996, when there was a risk that a local Front National candidate would win.

Le Pen took a different view and accused the Right of becoming left-wing (“Chirac is [Socialist leader Lionel] Jospin only worse”). In 1997, he raged against the Communists, “criminals, enemies of freedom,” now in the process of returning to government. Not for nothing did Mégret use the phrase “The Wall has fallen” in 1997, when his wife became mayor of Vitrolles (in the Bouches-du-Rhône). However, the Front National tended to stagnate or even regress, especially following the purge of the Mégret clan in 1998, which swept away a large proportion of the party’s cadres. There was a new generation in the Front National apparatus, more polished, less steeped in anti-communism, and less violent. This, too, helped to banalize the party in the eyes of French voters.

Despite the great surprise of Le Pen’s reaching the runoff of the 2002 presidential election, the Front National did not manage to make the most of its position. Le Pen suffered both internal political and financial difficulties. Even though the sociopolitical climate (insecurity, mass unemployment, and a shift in ideological reference points) worked in its favor, the Front National fell back in the 2007 presidential election, with Nicolas Sarkozy well ahead of it. It was one campaign too many. At seventy-eight, a weakened Le Pen prepared his third daughter to take over the party. Marine Le Pen succeeded him in 2011 and pursued the “detoxification” of the party, which had been in the making since 2002.

But her father refused to give up the reins completely and quickly countered her approach, once again stepping up his denialist and antisemitic outbursts. When he lost his temper, Le Pen’s anti-communism abruptly resurfaced, as when he shouted in 2011 in a debate at the European Parliament: “You’d think you were with the Bolsheviks!” Despite his advanced age, he persisted in seeking a sterile confrontation with a much-weakened PCF. In 2013, for example, Le Pen came to support a Front National list in the PCF stronghold of Champigny (Val-de-Marne): “Clientelism and immigration are the two breasts of local communism,” he declared on the sidelines of a demonstration. Le Pen became such an embarrassment to his daughter that she expelled him from the party in 2015. He subsequently lost influence, even if he persisted in expressing himself fluently.

As for Marine Le Pen, she has polished her discourse as much as possible, and today it’s rare for her to show her anti-communism. She did use it in her attempts to gain a foothold in the Pas-de-Calais region, particularly in 2012 when left-winger Jean-Luc Mélenchon ran against her in the parliamentary elections. His running mate was the leader of the local PCF federation, Hervé Poly, and speaking to broadcaster France Info Le Pen fulminated over the resurrection of the PCF’s “procession of madness, violence, and anarchy.” When the Front National took over small deindustrialized towns in 2014, such as Hayange in the heart of the former Lorraine steel industry, one of the first measures taken by the new Front National mayors was to cut subsidies to anti-poverty nonprofit Secours Populaire, accused of being a “branch” of the PCF. She also highlighted her anti-communism on further occasions, like in 2024, when she invoked the traditional “100 million dead of communism” to criticize the honoring in the Panthéon of the “Manouchian group” of immigrant Communist Resistance fighters. It’s also worth noting that Stéphane Courtois’s Black Book of Communism, which popularized this spurious figure contradicted by historians, is currently on the Rassemblement National’s list of recommended books for the “general education” of party activists. It’s a sign of the continuity in the party.

Bardella, who joined the Le Pen clan by pairing up with one of Marine’s nieces, also makes relatively little use of anti-communism, except on the occasion of the 2024 European debates against Léon Deffontaines. “You’re a communist. In 2014! It’s a question of growing up,” he told him on LCI, before the PCF candidate retorted, “Okay, OSS 117,” here referring to a famous series of parody spy films. Anti-communism is far more central to fellow far-right agitator Marion Maréchal’s discourse, especially since she distanced herself from her aunt in 2017. A hard-liner and supporter of Éric Zemmour before her recent return to the Le Pen fold, Maréchal often expresses this anti-communist line in her media appearances and tweets. Indeed, it’s in the young guard that we find the most radical and anti-communist elements, such as Rassemblement National spokesman Julien Odoul, not to mention the porosity with neofascist groups (on electoral lists, in the party hierarchy, or among its stewards) for whom anti-Bolshevism remains an end in itself.

This history of anti-communism à la française points to its central role in far-right ideology. It is as much a part of its doctrine as anti-feminism, authoritarianism or xenophobia. Throughout the last century, anti-communism went hand in hand with colonialism and all forms of racism. Its use and resurgence should be a warning to all democrats. There is every reason to criticize the errors and failures of twentieth-century communists. But at least in Western countries their place is clearly as part of the democratic field, on par with socialists or liberals. To fail to recognize this and to criminalize this political current is to reject anti-fascism, which targets the far right as exceptionally antidemocratic, and ultimately means accepting this latter’s own anti-communism. This reminder of the history of the Front and Rassemblement National is important at a time when the party is reaching new electoral heights and the republican front is proving so valuable.