Half a century ago, Jean-Marie Le Pen created a tiny grouping of the radical right together with SS and pro-colonial terrorists - it is now France's most popular party. The man has died; his legacy, unfortunately, lives on.
This text has been auto-translated from Polish.
According to the old adage, it's good or not at all to talk about the dead. If one were to adhere to it, Jean-Marie Le Pen's obituary would have to be empty, at least in the section on his public activity. After all, the National Front founder's political career has been built on sowing hatred, denying or belittling the Holocaust, making Muslims scapegoats and incessant court battles, where Le Pen usually acted as a defendant.
Ironically, the patriarch of the French far right passed away just in time for the tenth anniversary of the attack on "Charlie Hebdo," with which he had always been at odds. The satirical magazine at one time fought for the banning of the National Front, with very good reasons, especially if you look at the roots of France's main nationalist party and its co-founders.
Le Pen's Nazi colleagues
When the National Front was founded in 1972, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who already had a brief parliamentary experience, having made it to the National Assembly from the lists of Pierre Poujade's populist movement, was chosen as its leader. This was a largely tactical choice, as Le Pen was among the most moderate among the founders of the new party. So who were the others?
Among them we find, for example, members of the terrorist Organization of the Secret Army (OAS), which opposed the dismantling of the French colonial empire and was responsible for the failed assassination attempt on President De Gaulle. Added to this would be World War II collaborators involved in the construction of Vichy France, who belonged to fascist militias and were responsible for the brutal repression of the Resistance. As if that weren't enough, co-founders of the National Front included SS men from the French Waffen SS division, such as Léon Gaultier and Pierre Bousquet.
The latter, who served as treasurer of the new party, had been expelled a few years earlier from the racist-nationalist European Freedom Movement for Nazism and organizing seminars on reading Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf. In turn, just after the war, Bousquet was to be guillotined for collaboration, but the death sentence was eventually commuted to several years in prison. Many others of the FN's early leaders also had a history of unexecuted death sentences, prison stays or punishments of national demotion (a special sanction stripping collaborators of some of their civil rights), but Le Pen didn't mind becoming the face of an organization with such cadres.
Jean-Marie himself was not far from them with his views. He also whitewashed the collaborationist Vichy France, called Marshal Pétain a hero greater than De Gaulle, and considered leaving Algeria an act of dishonor to the latter. Besides, a dozen years before he founded the National Front, Le Pen volunteered to fight to maintain French rule over the North African state, another infamous page in his biography.
From the torture of Algerians to the second round of presidential elections
In French Algeria, Jean-Marie Le Pen served as an intelligence officer, and had a reputation for the brutality with which he treated suspected collaborators with the national liberation FLN, and sometimes random individuals. Numerous accounts - of both victims and comrades-in-arms - speak of the torture of Algerians, the torture with electric shocks and the execution of some of them. At the home of one of the interrogation victims (who was tortured and killed in front of his children), a French lieutenant lost his knife, suspiciously similar to the model originally produced for the Hitlerjugend, with "J.M. Le Pen 1er REP" engraved on it.
The person concerned himself admitted to torture in Algeria a few years after the war, but explained it by the need to obtain key information from "terrorists" and denied most of the accusations. He occasionally sued the media and historians reproaching him for torturing civilians, although more often he reported to the courts as a defendant. Indeed, Le Pen's political career has been marked by controversy, fierce polemics and hate speech.
For his apologia for war crimes, discrimination against LGBT people, attacks on religious minorities and insults against political opponents, the founder of the National Front has heard a total of more than 25 convictions. Several involved Le Pen's claims that the gas chambers were merely a "detail of history" - hence, after his death, it was often ironized that Jean-Marie had become that detail. Other lawsuits concerned his racist vision of France, in which he saw no place for citizens of the wrong background or religion. The FN leader divided society into real and "paper" French, heightening social tensions.
Despite constant court battles, the National Front grew in strength, and Jean-Marie Le Pen became its undisputed leader. Basing its campaigns on opposition to immigration, Euroskepticism, radical anti-communism and ultra-conservatism, the far right established itself on the French political scene in the 1980s, winning between ten and a dozen percent of the vote in each successive election. In 2002, thanks to the fragmentation of the left, this proved sufficient to present itself in the second round of the presidential election, which came as a profound shock to France at the time, mobilizing citizens to vote en masse for Chirac, against Le Pen.
Jean-Marie Le Pen was unable to break the glass ceiling, remaining too controversial and radical a figure, while his daughter successfully demonized the National Front, winning as much as a third of the vote in the last election and making the center-right government dependent on nationalist support. The elder Le Pen paid the price in the process with his expulsion from the party, but he still lived to see a far-reaching rehabilitation himself, as reactions after the death of the doyen of the far right showed.
Death feted in the streets, greeted with grief in government circles
Naturally, Jean-Marie's passing was greeted with sadness by his political circle, mourning the death of a "statesman" and "patriot." The left, on the other hand, spared no criticism of the deceased, reproaching him for all his misdeeds and soberly stating that the man died, but not his political ideas, which must still be fought against. Less balanced opinions were held by many French people spontaneously celebrating Le Pen's death in the streets of all major French cities, where fireworks were set off and bottles of champagne were opened, as if it were New Year's Day.
This, in turn, drew sharp condemnation from politicians in government circles, led by conservative Interior Ministry chief Bruno Retailleau. The attitude of the center-right here is most symptomatic of the normalization of the radical right in the French mainstream. The new head of government François Bayrou commented on the death of the founder of the National Front in a very conciliatory manner, calling Le Pen an important figure in French political life and a fighter, but leaving out in silence his racism, infamous past or the dozens of court sentences weighing on him. Anyway, most Macronists have chosen silence altogether, probably not wanting to express their true opinion of the founders of the party with which they find themselves in an informal coalition.
France has changed since 2002, when President Chirac refused to debate the leader of the far right and opposition to Le Pen united more than 80 percent of voters. These were also times when the political center was still among the main opponents of the nationalists, remembering the harmfulness of their ideas and the roots of the National Front. Once upon a time, when Le Pen and her colleagues came to disrupt a meeting of Simone Veil, the face of the struggle for women's rights and also a Jewish Holocaust survivor, the latter threw in their direction "I'm not afraid of you, I survived an encounter with worse than you, you're just SS men in short shorts."
Now their heirs are one step away from power, strenuously trying to rewrite the inconvenient past. That's why it's worth recalling the true views of Jean-Marie Le Pen or the identity of the other founders of the National Front, because although the nationalists have done much to improve their image, the apple doesn't fall far from the apple tree.
