Jean-Marie Le Pen Got the Last Laugh
Jean-Marie Le Pen, who died last month, attempted to forge an alliance between neo-fascists, apologists for French colonialism, and neglected working-class communities. Today this coalition threatens the foundations of the Fifth Republic.
Jean-Marie Le Pen prepares to deliver a speech on January 25, 2015, in Paris, France. (Alain Jocard / AFP via Getty Images)
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.
Looking back, the striking thing about my two Le Pen stories is just how universal they are. I suspect there are plenty of French people who think of Le Pen as a gros mot — and I am definitely not the only French person to have vivid memories of April 21, 2002. The sophisticated electoral estimations done by pollsters mean that the results of almost all French elections are known the very second that polls close at 8 p.m. On that fateful day in 2002, there was — quite literally — an enormous intake of breath as tens of millions of people saw Le Pen’s face zoom into the preprepared TV graphics indicating the winners of the first round.
It is important to remember, though, that the genuine shock most French people felt at Le Pen’s success was not because he was an unknown quantity. On the contrary, most politically literate people in France in 2002 knew precisely who he was. Think of it this way: for any French person born after World War II, Le Pen has been a fixture for their entire political life. No wonder that his death on January 7, 2025 at the age of ninety-six came as (another) shock. For some of us — me included — French politics is almost unthinkable without his looming presence.
Le Pen’s sheer longevity no doubt explains the cascade of obituaries, tributes, hate mail, and rage tweets that have appeared in the month since he died. These have reminded us of his ugly political personality. He was a man who reveled in controversy, and he did not hesitate to say the unsayable. He was boorish, racist, misogynistic, antisemitic, corrupt, venal, and violent. The image of him wearing an eye patch — which he did from 1965, when he injured his left eye, until the early 1980s — captured something of his outlaw quality. The patch made him look like a cross between a street fighter and a pirate, which, in retrospect, is an entirely appropriate set of associations.
But Le Pen was more than just a distasteful personality. He was a window into the darkest recesses of French politics. His existence — one is tempted to say his persistence — was a reminder that the constitutional settlement that gave birth to the Fifth Republic in 1958 was built on the ruins of political extremism. While the founder of the Fifth Republic, the celebrated resistance hero Charles de Gaulle, wanted his constitution to be strong and secure, the most astute observers knew that it was fragile. It tamed the political extremes, but Le Pen served as a perpetual reminder of its limitations. As long as he was alive, the far right had a guaranteed place on the political landscape.
Indeed, Le Pen represented almost all of the traditions of the French far right. Monarchists, Catholic fundamentalists, neo-fascists, or colonial apologists have been recurring figures throughout modern French history, but he — and, later, his family — managed to combine all of these extremes. His triumph in 2002 was a sign that he had brought France’s great counterrevolutionary tradition into the twenty-first century by reconciling it with democratic norms, globalized capitalism, and a postcolonial world.
A Creature of Resentments
Le Pen came of age at a time when the French far right had been definitively defeated. In 1945, fascism and its allies had been crushed in Europe, and its acolytes had been scattered. This did not, of course, mean that the far right had disappeared. There were plenty of people — ordinary citizens and politicians alike — who hastily airbrushed their fascist, Nazi, or collaborationist pasts with the coming of new political regimes, but far-right sympathies remained alive below the surface.
One of the few acceptable forms of far-right rhetoric in postwar Europe was virulent anti-communism — and, not surprisingly, this is where Le Pen’s political life began. While he was studying law in Paris in the late 1940s, he and his friends enthusiastically embraced the thuggish anti-communist street politics of the day, in which both the “cops” and the “reds” were fair game. This worldview never left him: it is an often-forgotten fact that Le Pen’s party — the Front National (FN) — was passionately anti-communist through the 1970s and 1980s. This partly explains why the FN first achieved some measure of electoral success when socialists and communists were actually in power in the early 1980s.
It was also anti-communism that propelled the young Le Pen into the arms of the populist politician Pierre Poujade in the early 1950s. When Le Pen ran for election for the first time in 1956, it was under the banner of poujadisme. During the electoral campaign, he wielded the rhetorical axe, slashing at his opponents with insults and threats. At one election rally, he told his audience that “it is necessary and normal for a certain number of people to pay for the massacre and ruin of this country with their lives.” He still won a seat in parliament.
The combination of antidemocratic and apocalyptic rhetoric had been the stock-in-trade of the French far right for more than a century, but Le Pen — crucially — alloyed it with resentment in the form of colonial nostalgia. A few years earlier, he had volunteered to fight in Indochina. Although he arrived too late to take part in the crushing defeat at Dien Bien Phu in spring 1954, which led to the French withdrawal, his experience left a deep impression on him. The humiliation of France in the distant jungles of Southeast Asia gave a new meaning to his political ambitions.
There is no better indication of the depth of his attachment to French colonialism than his decision to step aside as a member of parliament for six months to join his former parachute regiment in Algeria at the height of the first phase of counterinsurgency in 1957 — the period made famous by the film Battle of Algiers. This time, he did fight — and he fought dirty, like so many other French recruits and conscripts. But, as in Indochina, the final outcome was not the one for which he had fought. Again, the French were brought to heel, and Algeria gained its independence in 1962.
This second defeat had an even more profound impact than the first. More than anything else, a deep longing for French Algeria defined Le Pen’s outlook from the early 1960s onward. By this time, he was firmly entrenched on the “nationalist” wing of the French far right, surrounded by embittered ex-military men, veterans of failed colonial campaigns, unreconstructed antisemites, neo-fascists, and angry racists. At times, this group overlapped with organizations composed of reactionary Catholics and monarchists, but he was always more interested in those who recognized the urgency of France’s catastrophic colonial endgame. At the same time as de Gaulle was, to use the historian Todd Shepard’s words, “inventing” a new history for France after the loss of Algeria, Le Pen was clinging to the colonial past, confident that it could be invoked again at a moment’s notice.
The immediate future, however, was not promising. During the first two decades of the Fifth Republic, it seemed as if the Gaullist story of France as an independent, modern, European power had triumphed. Not even Le Pen’s successful unification of various far-right strands in the form of the FN in 1972 could inflect the tide. Both the Gaullist political consensus and the architecture of the Fifth Republic — the electoral system of which was carefully designed to suppress extremist parties and personalities — consigned Le Pen to the margins. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, he scarcely managed to gain more than 5 percent of the vote in any of the parliamentary or presidential elections for which he stood, and, in 1981, he did not even manage to get the five hundred signatures required to stand as a presidential candidate.
But Le Pen was right: there were constituencies of voters who could be mobilized for the far-right cause. They fell into two categories: those for whom the Fifth Republic had always been illegitimate, and those for whom the promises of the Fifth Republic turned out to be hollow.
The emblematic example of the first category were the pieds-noirs, the name given to Algeria’s European settler population. Almost a million of them fled to metropolitan France after 1962, abandoning property, memories, and livelihoods on the other side of the Mediterranean. Le Pen understood their plight. He shared their nostalgia for empire, their hatred for de Gaulle — who, they claimed, had sold Algeria to a bunch of terrorists — and their visceral dislike of all “Arabs.”
As postcolonial immigration became more visible in the 1970s and 1980s, the pieds-noirs became a bedrock of support for the FN across south and southeastern France. They lapped up Le Pen’s racist language and his critique of immigration. They found in him a voice for their grievances, real or imagined. If they could not get Algeria back, the least they could do was get Algerians out of France — and only Le Pen could promise this with any conviction.
The second category of FN voters was drawn from areas that experienced the full force of deindustrialization. The Fifth Republic had been built on the promise of industrial expansion. The planners who dominated the state in the 1960s saw a bright future of full employment and industrial growth, led by large semi-nationalized corporations. This vision collapsed in the 1970s and 1980s as unemployment soared and stubbornly refused to come down, becoming one of the most striking features of the French economy. The social effects of unemployment tore through deindustrializing communities in northern and eastern France. Some of these areas had been bastions of the socialist or communist left, but the experience of left-wing government in the 1980s convinced many who lived in these areas that they had been abandoned by their representatives. Instead, they started to consider Le Pen as a viable alternative.
Despite notable successes, the growth of the FN in working-class areas was limited through the 1980s because the party’s strong anti-communist tendency still predisposed it to a free-market economic platform. But, with the end of the Cold War, Le Pen and his foot soldiers were free to embrace a protectionist rhetoric, which has continued to dominate the party’s messaging to the present day. By the time Le Pen achieved his famous breakthrough in 2002, the transformation was complete: the FN was well on its way to becoming France’s most authentic working-class party.
The Right Resurgent
One of the more remarkable things about Le Pen in his later years was the way he cemented his legacy. He was, of course, famously sidelined from the party he founded by his daughter Marine, and eventually expelled altogether in 2015. But the Le Pen name has infiltrated every corner of the far right. At the end of his life, he was able to watch with some satisfaction as Marine twice reached — and lost — the second round of the presidential election in 2017 and 2022, and his party gained more and more seats in parliament (an astonishing 124 in the 2024 legislative elections). He could also take comfort from the fact that his granddaughter Marion-Maréchal had successfully associated the Le Pen family with Éric Zemmour’s new reactionary far-right movement, Reconquête.
The latter must have been particularly satisfying for him because it was precisely Zemmour’s rich, bourgeois, Catholic, and conservative electorate that had eluded him during his own political career. Rumor has it that he adopted the name Jean-Marie during his first electoral campaign in 1956 — his first name at birth was simply Jean — because it made him sound more “Catholic.” It is not clear that this was a successful rebranding strategy since this constituency rarely voted for him. But, as with so much else, he had the last laugh when his granddaughter became the youthful face of Reconquête more than sixty years later. For Le Pen, politics was always a long game.
And what of the Fifth Republic? Today it lies in tatters, its institutions stretched to breaking point by the dislocation of the political system that began with the shock of 2002. The themes that made Le Pen a household name — postcolonial anxiety, the neglect of hard-working Frenchmen, and the “decline” of France — are all part of everyday political rhetoric, and there has been a general resurgence of far-right rhetoric on TV talk shows and social media. Those who argue that Le Pen’s ideas and language have been normalized are surely right.
Yet the lessons of Le Pen’s life run deeper than simply rhetoric. His long political career is a reminder of the vitality and strength of France’s far right. For much of the postwar period, European politics was predicated on a weak far right. Anti-fascism was the dominant political language of the democratic West and the communist East. The Fifth Republic, too, operated according to these rules. By settling the Algerian question and stabilizing a fractious political system, it marked the triumph of a peculiar brand of right-wing Gaullist anti-fascism.
But an anti-fascist consensus began to wither away in the 1980s and fell apart completely after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. It became apparent that the far right had not gone away. It had simply been in abeyance, smothered by political taboos and reduced to little more than a gros mot. For those like Le Pen, who had waited for decades to be given their rightful place at the political table, this was the moment to strike.
He understood that he needed to hit France’s political system where it hurt — and he did this by drawing on the depth of the country’s far-right tradition to mobilize new constituencies of voters. For those on the French left, who have watched helplessly as they have been outflanked by his party and his ideas, it has been a bitter lesson. After all, Le Pen’s entire political career is a reminder that resentment and anger are political emotions every bit as powerful as solidarity and hope.