Every French person has at least one Jean-Marie Le Pen story. I have two, both of which long predate my scholarly interest in France.

The first goes back to when I was around six or seven, spending the summers with my aunts, uncles, and cousins in a large house in Haute-Provence in the late 1980s. During one of my stays, my closest cousin, who was only a year younger than me, informed me that “Le Pen” was a gros mot — a swear word. Given the way everyone used “Le Pen” as a vague form of insult, this seemed plausible to me, and I must have believed her for a few days. Eventually, she informed me that “Le Pen” was not, in fact, a swear word but the name of a politician. This led to many jokes at my expense, and perhaps also a little sympathy for my childish naivety.

My second story relates to that fateful day — April 21, 2002 — when Le Pen made it through to the second round of the presidential election. As it happens, this was the very first election in which I was entitled to vote, but I had not been able to do so because I was traveling abroad (the French do not allow postal voting). I learned of his shock success while having a greasy breakfast in a roadside café in New Zealand, more than 18,000 kilometers away from Paris. When I walked angrily out of the café, I vowed I would never abstain from an election again.