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Jean-Marie Le Pen: Founder of France’s National Front Party Has Died at 96.
Jean-Marie Le Pen has died, aged 96, on the same day that France solemnly honored the victims of the Islamist terrorist attack on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo ten years earlier. Charlie Hebdo had once tried to have Le Pen’s party banned for its alleged racist and anti-Islamic views. Shortly before Le Pen’s death was announced on Tuesday, a survivor of the massacre at Charlie Hebdo, cartoonist Coco, reminded the French that “only the right and the extreme right” still take a firm stand against Islamism. She said in an interview with Le Figaro newspaper that the left had abandoned “what should be the fight of all republicans.”
Le Pen died at a clinic near Paris “in the presence of his nearest and dearest,” according to his family. He cut a strange figure in French politics when, in the early 1980s, he happened upon the stage of mainstream media and politics. Before 1981, the year socialist François Mitterrand came to power, Le Pen had been the victim of an unofficial boycott — newspapers, radio, and television stations judged his views on immigration and race beyond the pale.
However, Mitterrand, at the extreme opposite of Le Pen’s views, persuaded the main radio and television broadcasters to stop silencing his adversary. After all, he himself had complained of censorship by the Right during the presidency of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing (1974-1981).
Mitterrand’s gesture was not totally magnanimous, however, as Le Pen’s rising popularity weakened Mitterand’s other right-wing opponents: conservative parties whose voters deemed their leaders too soft on the socialist-communist government that had started the legalization of illegal migrants on a grand scale. Voters who preferred Le Pen’s uncompromising stance.
As a result of Mitterrand’s service to free speech, viewers and listeners were treated to the sight of a loud-mouthed provocative politician lambasting the quasi-official government doctrine that favored multiculturalism.
Le Pen surprised, or appalled, viewers by painting immigration from France’s former colonies not as “une chance pour la France,” according to a sanctimonious lie from the Left, but as a scourge on the French people — a victim, according to him, of lax border controls that he deemed responsible for a crime wave and a burden on the French welfare state.
“One million people out of work means one million immigrants too many,” was a slogan “banned” in the mainstream media until Le Pen aired those sentiments on programs watched and listened to by millions of French citizens. Such was the horror he caused, that star journalist Anne Sinclair, née Anne-Elise Schwartz, refused to interview him, especially after Le Pen had made remarks deemed anti-Semitic, which would later contribute to his downfall.
Towards the end of his life, which had started in 1928 in the Breton village of La Trinité-sur-Mer, Le Pen could, with some justification, claim that he had been correct about the link between immigration and crime. The Left and moderate Right had vilified him for airing such an unwelcome fact, but President Emmanuel Macron acknowledged in 2022 that “at least half” of the criminal acts in Paris were committed by foreigners, illegal aliens, or other similar actors.
In April 2023, Macron’s minister of finance tartly stated that the French were “fed up” with seeing social security benefits fraudulently end up “in North African countries.” Another example of what the Left terms the “lepénisation” of France where views once considered discriminatory are now par for the course.
Le Pen’s Early Life
Le Pen set great store by his Breton roots, as the son of a fisherman who had died in 1942 when his vessel hit a German mine. After that tragedy, young Jean-Marie became a ward of the French state, which helped his mother financially in rough times and financed the young man’s university education. As a law student, he frequented extreme right-wing movement events and took part in brawls in the Latin Quarter with left-wing, often communist, adversaries. In one of them, he claims to have lost the sight in his left eye, long covered by a black patch until, in the early 1980s, he opted for a glass model to look less like an operatic pirate.
As a young man in the 1950s, he rallied to lost causes as France failed to suppress insurrections in Indochina and Algeria. Le Pen enrolled in the Foreign Legion and witnessed his country losing those colonies. Algeria has accused him of torturing anti-French activists. As the Algerian war had spilled over onto French territory, the hard right looked for leaders and young Jean-Marie fitted the bill.
In 1956, at the age of 27, he was elected to parliament for the first time, as the youngest member ever. In 1962, he lost his seat and became politically rudderless until 1972, when he co-founded the Front National, deemed extremist or neo-fascist due to the leading roles of former Nazi collaborators during the occupation of France. Le Pen has always claimed that he had offered his services to the Resistance in Brittany but was turned down because of his young age.
Five times during his tumultuous career he ran as a presidential candidate. In his first attempt in 1974, he got a pathetic 0.74 percent of the vote. In 2002, however, with 16.86 percent of the vote, he made it through to the decisive second round of voting where he was trounced by Jacques Chirac. Le Pen’s modest success still haunts the French Left that had portrayed him as a fascist and a danger to French democracy, although Le Pen never pleaded for its abolition.
In 1976, well before his rise to notoriety, his apartment in Paris was destroyed in a bomb attack. He, his then-wife Pierrette, and their three daughters survived unscathed but badly shaken. A culprit was never found. Two years later, Le Pen’s intellectual mentor was killed when a bomb exploded under his car, another mystery never solved. Were left-wing extremists to blame, or were the attacks linked to power struggles within Le Pen’s movement where experts in handling explosives were rife?
Throughout his career, which also took him to the European Parliament, Le Pen never wasted an opportunity to provoke and to shock — like the 1987 radio interview where he stated that the gas chambers were a mere “detail” in the history of World War II. It caused an outcry and huge demonstrations all over France, and one of his countless heavy fine penalties. Was he an anti-Semite? A member of the Jewish community in Nice told us that he didn’t think so, but that he judged Le Pen capable of pretending to be one in order to secure the vote of Jew-baiters.
Shortly after this umpteenth provocation, a “coup” at the top of the Front National narrowly failed to unseat Le Pen. The plotters argued, with reason, that their party would never come to power with such an unelectable figurehead. The coup failed but left its scars on both the party and the Le Pen family, one of whose daughters took the side of the “felons,” as Le Pen called his opponents. Marine, the youngest sibling, remained loyal to her father, though with gritted teeth.
His wife Pierrette had by then left him, disgusted, she said, with his racist rants. When he refused to pay her alimony, and suggested she should work as a cleaner to make a living, she posed for Playboy in the soft porn version of a toiling soubrette half-revealing an indeed voluptuous body. Years later, after her lover, a journalist, had left her penniless, Pierrette returned to the family fold. Le Pen had remarried but allowed her to stay in a bungalow on the grounds of the grand mansion, Montretout, that he had inherited under dubious circumstances from an admirer in the chic Parisian suburb of Saint-Cloud.
Passing the Torch
In 2011, Le Pen gave over the reigns of his party to Marine but kept annoying her with racist and anti-Semitic piques from which she firmly distanced herself in order to make the National Front fit for high office. Four years later, Marine expelled her father from the party he had founded when he kept refusing to shut up. In 2018, she changed the party’s name, too reminiscent of its origins in the far right, to Rassemblement National, National Rally.
From his mansion, surrounded by a small circle of devotees, a fuming Le Pen witnessed Marine steer his former party towards the more respectable right, which remains torn between members keen to collaborate with her and those largely in agreement with President Emanuel Macron.
Le Pen reluctantly congratulated his daughter when, in April 2022, she got 41.46 percent of the vote in the presidential elections, against 58.54 percent for the re-elected Macron. A feat Le Pen never came close to achieving. He uttered, with some difficulty, the same polite congrats when shortly afterward Marine’s Rassemblement became the most powerful force on the right in parliament. Two years later, her party went on to crush Macron’s liberals and the left in the European elections and nearly doubled its seats during the early parliamentary elections Macron had called after his defeat.
By then, an ailing Jean-Marie Le Pen was reduced to a shadow of his fiery former self, falling asleep halfway through interviews. Despite its electoral feats, real power, namely the presidency, eludes the party he founded. The curse many French people still attach to his name may have a lot to do with it.
READ MORE from René ter Steege:
France and Murderous Islamist Education
Jordan Bardella, Marine Le Pen’s Crown Prince
The post Jean-Marie Le Pen: Founder of France’s National Front Party Has Died at 96. appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.
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