Announcing Jean-Marie Le Pen’s death at age 96 on 7 January, Jordan Bardella expressed only respect: “In the French army uniform in Algeria and Indochina, as the people’s tribune in the National Assembly and the European Parliament, he always served France, defending its identity and sovereignty.”
Le Pen was the founder of France’s far-right National Front party – which has since been rebadged National Rally, with 29-year-old Bardella as its president. The party today presents a fresh face, boasting of its “de-toxification” and even expelled Le Pen for antisemitic statements in 2015. Yet National Rally remains a creature of his making, representing a long struggle to rebuild the nationalist right that began in the colonial quagmire of Le Pen’s youth.
Born in a port village in Brittany in 1928, Le Pen loved to cast himself as an outsider who had disrupted the elites. He was indeed from a humble background and during World War II, he lost his father — a fisherman — to a mine which blew up his boat. Yet Le Pen soon made it to the Law Faculty in Paris, where he became active in right-wing student politics.
Le Pen joined the army’s parachutists in 1953 and only reached Indochina after the defeat at Dien Bien Phu signalled the end of France’s southeast Asian colonies. At the January 1956 elections he became an MP for the Poujadists — a short lived anti-tax protest movement, with a strong reactionary, anti-establishment and antisemitic hue — but by October the young Le Pen had secured a leave of absence from parliament to enlist in the colonial war in Algeria. His exploits there would dog his career, starting with the 1962 accusation by historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet that Le Pen had tortured Algerians. The discovery of a Hitler Youth dagger on which Le Pen had engraved his name and left in Algiers ensured a long series of legal defeats, when Le Pen tried to sue his accusers for defamation.
The commitment to l’Algérie française — considering Africa’s largest country an integral part of France — provided identitarian glue for nationalist critics of Gaullism in the 1960s, even after the colony was irrecoverably lost. Le Pen founded the National Front in 1972, bringing together the neofascist street movement Ordre Nouveau, several former Nazi-collaborators and veterans of the Secret Army Organisation (OAS), who had organised terrorist attacks in the colony and even attempted to assassinate Charles de Gaulle in the attempt to prevent France’s exit from Algeria. Like OAS, far-right paramilitaries around the West in this period were inspired by the doctrine of “revolutionary war” against both communists and anticolonial movements. Yet the formation of the National Front expressed the need for a parliamentary face to recycle such far-right figures into electoral politics.
A major ally in this sense was the Italian Social Movement (MSI), an electoral party supported by a violent neofascist subculture. It provided both ideological training and financial support for Le Pen’s National Front, which even adopted the MSI’s tricolour flame logo. Le Pen had already worked on the far-right Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour’s 1965 presidential campaign, which brought together former Vichyites and partisans of l’Algérie française, and in the 1970s pursued the project for a broader “national camp,” uniting different strands and generations of French nationalism. This was what Charles Maurras, the editor of the far-right newspaper Action française, had once called the “nationalist compromise”, as Le Pen sought — not always successfully — to surmount the many splits between neo-Nazis, revolutionary nationalists, former Vichyites, Catholic reactionaries, and even some former Resistance members.
Electoral results for the National Front in its first decade were routinely dismal. Yet the left’s return to power in 1981, initially under a Socialist-Communist coalition, soon energised Le Pen’s party. This was in part a product of disappointment at then President François Mitterrand’s reformist promise, which soon turned to austerity — and started to break up the left-wing working-class electorate. But Mitterrand also used Le Pen, a talented orator, to divide right-wing opposition: the President told the public broadcaster to begin platforming the National Front and in 1986 even instituted a (short-lived) proportional voting system, which allowed Le Pen’s party its first major cohort of MPs.
Start the new year with a New Statesman subscription from only £8.99 per month.
Accounts of the party today often present a reform process whereby Le Pen’s daughter, Marine, transformed her father’s extremist force into a broader right-wing party able to attract middle of the road voters over cost-of-living issues, and more recently abandoning calls for France to leave the European Union. Yet such a redemptive story ignores the fact that the National Front had for decades reached out beyond the far-right subculture, and taken steps to “detoxify” its image, including sporadically running ethnic-minority candidates and defectors from other parties. Often trying to present himself as a French equivalent to Reagan (even managing to be photographed shaking his hand) and setting out a pan-European right-wing project, the elder Le Pen courted both more middle-class, Catholic-traditionalist voters in southeastern France and blue-collar voters in postindustrial climes who felt abandoned by the major parties.
The National Front’s boast from the 1990s that it had become “the leading party of French workers” was a powerful rhetorical weapon against a fragmenting left, even if more blue-collar workers favoured abstention over Le Pen’s party itself. The breakthrough in 2002 — in which, for the first time, Le Pen reached the second round of the presidential election — was a shock to the Socialists, but did at least meet with a major public response; Le Pen was crushed by an 82 to 18 per cent margin in the final vote against Jacques Chirac, on a high turnout.
Despite that electoral revolt, the “LePen-isation of people’s minds” has continued apace, with the issues of immigration and Islam becoming increasingly central to the entire political arena. If the National Front of 1972 was obsessed with the loss of France’s colonies and the communist threat, Jean-Marie Le Pen bequeathed a party whose identity politics above all hinged on the Muslim presence in France – what some anti-immigration authors paint as a “reverse colonisation”. As France’s far right has more recently sought to shake off past associations, even the long European tradition of antisemitism is framed as a Muslim import; Le Pen’s granddaughter Marion Maréchal claimed in November 2023 that “if Jean-Marie Le Pen had been listened to forty years ago there’d be far less antisemites in France”.
A striking statement – Le Pen’s once claimed that the Nazi gas chambers were a “detail of history” – though such rhetoric is unlikely to be voiced by leaders of the current party. Yet the obituaries retelling Le Pen’s past in the company of Vichyites and fanatics for Algérie française are hardly sufficient to embarrass the National Rally. Reports on its extremist heritage, and even the racist statements of its present-day candidates, have had diminishing returns in rallying effective opposition, amidst declining faith in Emmanuel Macron’s enfeebled government. Even faced with an alliance of left-wing and centrist voters against it in last summer’s parliamentary elections, the National Rally still reached historic highs.
Late in life, Jean-Marie Le Pen was humiliated when he was expelled from the party he founded, following a feud with his daughter and party leader Marine in 2015 – thrown overboard in order to project an image of renewal. Yet this same party is coming ever closer to the electoral triumph – which would forever enshrine Jean-Marie Le Pen as one of the leading figures in the French political history of the last century.
[See more: A new government won’t fix France’s political crisis]