His daughter Marie Le Pen has tried to distance her party from its former, outwardly fascist leader. But, argues Yuri Prasad, Jean-Marie Le Pen created the conditions for the rise of the far right in France
The odious figure of Jean-Marie Le Pen (Photo: Wikimedia commons)
Yuri Prasad
Sunday 12 January 2025
Sunday 12 January 2025
On the night fascist leader Jean-Marie Le Pen died last week there was dancing on the streets of Paris. Thousands partied, and some carried signs that read, “The dirty racist is dead”, or more simply, “Beautiful day”.
Mainstream politicians were aghast that the joyous protesters seemed to have “no respect”. “Nothing, absolutely nothing justifies dancing on a corpse,” said interior minister Bruno Retailleau. “The death of a man, even if he is a political opponent, should inspire only restraint and dignity. These scenes of jubilation are deeply disgraceful.”
Really? What respect did the former leader of the National Front (FN) ever show his enemies?
Was he “respectful” when he dismissed the Nazi gas chambers? He told a press conference in 1987, “If you take a 1,000-page book on the Second World War, the concentration camps take up only two pages and the gas chambers 10 to 15 lines. This is what one calls a detail.”
Or how about when he described the German occupation of France during the Second World War—during which about 76,000 French Jews were sent to death camps—as “not particularly inhumane”.
Le Pen in 1988 dismissed a Jewish minister called Durafour with a sick pun on “four”, meaning oven—“Durafour-crématoire.” Did Durafour not deserve respect?
What about the many people that testified that Le Pen had tortured them while a paratrooper in France’s war against the Algerian Front de Liberation Nationale? Are Algerians not to be respected?
And what about the Muslims Le Pen repeatedly targeted? Courts fined him for inciting racial hatred against them in 2003, 2005, 2008 and 2011. These days, of course, it is almost pointless to demand politicians not demonise Islam—it has become their national sport.
Le Pen showed no respect and deserved none when he died.
Obituaries in the mainstream press talk of Le Pen as “gaffe-prone” or dismiss him as a “provocateur”. His outbursts are those of a buffoon, they say. Yet Le Pen’s racist statements were calculated and very much part of a plan.
Le Pen was a convinced Nazi who began his political life street fighting the left while at university. Before founding the FN, he ran a record label that produced albums heralding Nazi war marches and celebrating French intellectuals who had collaborated with the German occupation.
France, he said, was in need of “purification”, because it had strayed from Gallic and Roman Catholic roots—and what he called “the natural order, which is family, homeland, teaching and respect for the living world.”
To get to the France Le Pen craved, he knew it would take a movement that could seize control of the state and transform it in its own image. That movement was fascism.
But in the wake of the Second World War, and particularly after the discovery of the Nazi death camps, fascism was hard to sell. Millions of people who had seen the consequences of the Nazis first hand despised fascism’s ideas of racial purity and its hatred of democracy.
Those few activists that remained committed to the far right recognised they could not simply repeat the strategies of the 1930s. When the FN was born in the early 1970s, its leaders knew that it had to avoid being labelled “fascist” lest it be barred from the political mainstream.
At the same time, they also knew of fascism’s need for a disciplined core of supporters that understood that the road to power would be bloody.
From the early 1970s onwards, Le Pen and other FN leaders developed a way of speaking that could push at the limits of what authorities deemed acceptable. It was what Jim Wolfreys and Peter Fysh in their book refer to as “dual discourse”.
One part was “official and explicit, presenting itself as a legitimate part of the political establishment,” they wrote, while the other was “unofficial and implicit, reflecting its anti-democratic, authoritarian agenda.”
The FN’s hard talk “deliberately creates a tension between the organisation and its periphery, between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ support, seeking to address sympathisers where they are and take them where the Front wants to go.”
So, rather than mis-spoken words, Le Pen’s attacks were a calculated attempt to enlarge and toughen his party’s inner fascist core.
But the statements had another purpose too. In the 1990s, the FN created its own immigration catch phrases for its spokespersons and activists to endlessly repeat. They included the word “invasion” and the expressions “levels of tolerance” of immigration and the “noise and smell” of foreigners.
So, when mainstream right politician Jacques Chirac—then mayor of Paris but a future national president—talked of immigrants as noisy and smelly, victory bells rang in the FN headquarters.
As mainstream politicians started to pepper their speeches with fascist phrases and talking points, FN leaders could then say, “Which do you prefer—the original or the copy?”
The fascists had successfully shifted both the language and the policies of the centre on immigration towards its own agenda. And it was this that allowed the FN entrance to the centre stage of French politics—the presidential elections.
In addition to his racism, Le Pen charged that all politicians at the Parisian centre, whether of the left or the right, were “tous pourris, tous complices, tous lointaines”—“all rotten, all accomplices, all distant”.
In 2002, he caused consternation when he emerged from the first round of the presidential race as the sole challenger to Chirac. Though he eventually came a distant second, Le Pen won nearly five million votes for a hard, racist programme.
But for the most politically ambitious in the FN, the vote was nowhere near close enough. They decided that the party would do better without Le Pen at the helm. The FN brand needed further detoxifying, they said.
Le Pen’s daughter Marine took the helm after the election and began a cleansing operation in an attempt to win support from more mainstream right voters and to make cooperation with their parties possible. She distanced herself from her father’s antisemitism, declaring Nazi concentration camps “the height of barbarity.”
And she ousted her father from the party in 2015, when he was its honorary president, and said his repeated Holocaust denial showed that “his goal is to cause harm” to the party. Three years later, she renamed it National Rally (RN).
But despite the cosmetics, RN’s aim is the same as that of the FN. It is to organise the radical right under the leadership of fascists. Party candidates are regularly revealed to have spent time in openly Nazi associations and as having made recent racist and antisemitic speeches.
And the FN strategy of dual discourse continues in RN but the target has moved almost exclusively to Muslims.
Marine Le Pen talks of the “incessant demands of minorities” and Muslim face veils being an ideological marker “as dangerous as Nazism”. The intention is to take the commonplace ideology of Islamophobia and push it further than those of the mainstream parties.
And a key RN policy is to change the French constitution so that immigrants have fewer rights than those born in the country. This policy of “national preference” would be used to ensure “French people” have priority over migrants in benefits, housing and health.
Much of the RN membership have embraced this hardline but mainstream political shift as necessary. But within the ranks there are many that understand well what Jean-Marie learned in his 20s, that the kind of France they want can only be obtained by in “revolutionary” nationalist means.
Le Pen senior warned the FN’s youth wing in 1996 of what to expect. “Crisis is the great midwife of history,” he said. “When situations are blocked, it’s generally the drive of human nature that forces a breakthrough into new times…
“There is a time when all that will end… at a certain point the worm-eaten structures of our system are going to collapse.”
Le Pen may be right about the coming crisis. But it’s our job to ensure that very different forces from his take advantage of those circumstances.The Politics of Racism in France by Peter Fysh and Jim Wolfreys, published by Palgrave Macmillan, £27.99. Available from Bookmarks Bookshop
