Jean-Marie Le Pen, historic leader of the French extreme right, dies

Le Pen (La Trinité-sur-Mer, Brittany, June 20, 1928 – Paris, January 7, 2024) will go down in French political history as the leader who refounded the extreme right, united in a single party, the National Front (1972 – 2018), from which he was expelled by his own daughter, after criticizing a “recentraje” that tried to break with the most sulphurous family tradition.

Le Pen was born into a relatively modest family, very practicing Catholic Bretons. Fisherman father, owner of several boats, seamstress mother, daughter of farmers. Educated in a traditionalist Catholicism, he was able to study law in Paris, where he discovered his patriotism, which soon had a martial version, as soldier, in former French Indochina and during the Algerian war of independence, very active in the “battle of Algiers” (1957).

In Algiers, Le Pen became friends with some of the generals who They would later try to assassinate General de Gaulleparticipating and personally practicing torture against Algerians suspected of terrorism.

Agitator on the periphery of political life

Back in Paris, Le Pen began to participate in the periphery of political life, as a friend, collaborator, accomplice and agitator in a string of small groups, between rip-and-tear populism (Pierre Poujade), the traditional extreme right (Jean -Louis Tixier-Vignancour) and some military putschists (Raoul Salan). Intriguing, talkative, “seductive”that rainbow of very “borderline” friendships, were the founding matrix of the National Front (FN, extreme right), the political party into which the last remains of the old Action Française (AF, extreme right between the wars) were integrated. Occident, Groupe union défense (GUD), Ordre nouveau (ON), neo-Nazi and neo-fascist groups, where former Waffen-SS collaborators and leaders, directly Nazis, were active to the memory of Hitler.

Le Pen It took thirty years to convert an extremist, minority group, with less than 2% of national votersin a “government” party, capable of eliminating the socialist candidate in the first round of a presidential election.

The success of the National Front

In 1972, Le Pen and her FN were nothing. A marginal personality and small group. In 1986, François Mitterrand, socialist president, changed electoral legislation, allowing Le Pen to make a triumphant entry into the National Assembly (AN), with 35 deputies. In 2002, Le Pen eliminated the socialist candidate, Lionel Jospin, in the first round of the presidential election, eliminated in the second round by Jacques Chirac.

The sole architect of that impressive rise, Le Pen ruined and put a stop to such a process with a rosary of scandals and ultra-sulphurous statementsat the same time that he sowed the fiercest division within his own family.

He ruined his own political success

Intoxicated by his successes, the extremist leader began to comment on current affairs and history in a scandalous manner, evoke the Nazi concentration camps, the work of Jewish journaliststhe crematorium ovens where millions of Jews were gassed, the behavior of the SS, among other historical “accidents.” Comments that earned Le Pen numerous judicial convictions for crimes such as “apology for war crimes”, “contesting crimes against humanity”, “incitement to hatred”, “racial discrimination and violence”.

Turbulent family life

Political drunkenness also had a tragic family derailment. The triumphs enriched Le Pen, benefiting from million-dollar donations, and precipitated a grotesque crisis with the mother of his daughtersPierrette Lalanne, who ended up having herself photographed semi-nude, in “Playboy.” The photos of a mother dressed as a nanny, with her ass in the air, delicately caressed with a feather duster, caused a family storm, between the daughters, the father and the niece, Marion Marechal Le Pen.

Skilled politician, the patriarch He behaved towards his family in a catastrophic manner. He took sides against his niece, Marion, against his own daughter, he decided to remarry a divorced and millionaire lady who fell badly among his daughters and he began to kick the second-stringers of his own party, who ended up opening cracks in a FN upward.

Between 1980 and 1990Le Pen led the slow but solid political implementation of the FNlimited by electoral legislation that favored large parties over small ones. Between 1990 and 2002, the establishment of the extreme right in the working-class electorate, the emergence of the FN in municipal politics in several regions, the succession of judicial convictions, culminated in initiating hidden tensions with his own daughter.

The rise of Marine Le Pen

Former number two of the FN, Bruno Megret decided to break with Le Pen. Marine Le Pen began to discuss secretly, in private, her own fatherpolitically “in love” with his niece Marion. Judicial scandals and financial difficulties temporarily stopped the FN, a victim of the behavior and line of its founding president, who began by choosing a possible successor, Bruno Gollnisch, a potential “dolphin” of the hard extreme right.

Hardened since she was a child in the intrigues of the family court, Marine Le Pen did not allow herself to be robbed of the leadership of the party founded by her father. And he surrounded himself with a praetorian guard of young wolves, among whom were several homosexuals. At the Tours Congress on January 16, 2011, Marine Le Pen became president and leader of the FN founded by her father, relegated to the position of “honorary president.” Horrified and cruel, vengeful, he believed he could politically destroy his own daughter. And he launched a campaign against the “new” FN, accused of being a “gay party”, among other miseries.

Without filial piety, Marine Le Pen ended up expelling her father from the FN. The conflict had many judicial issues, which Marine ended up winning, who put an end to his paternal inheritance by changing the name of the FN and calling it the National Group (AN) in 2018. The Le Pen era was beginning to die. Marine chose an ambitious young man as secretary general of the new recent far-right party, Jordan Bardella. It was the last straw against the father.

A father’s revenge

Le Pen Sr. tried to take revenge, warmly supporting his niece Marion Marechal Le Pen, who had broken up with Marine to embark on another minority ultra-right adventure, led by Éric Zemour, Marine Le Pen’s political first-blood adversary, who he continued with caution. distances the first hospitalizations of his father, with whom he was never politically reconciled, until the end.