Despite France’s best efforts, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the country’s extreme-right National Front, was impossible to ignore
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Before Donald Trump’s politically driven hate campaign against undocumented immigrants, France was forced to deal with its own right-wing populist firebrand: Jean-Marie Le Pen.
Le Pen, whose death at the age of 96 was announced Tuesday, began his political career when he was elected in 1956 to France’s National Assembly as one of the youngest deputies in its history. At the time, Le Pen, who was only 27, had allied himself with Pierre Poujade, a bookstore owner who organized a grassroots, protest campaign to convince small shop owners to refuse to pay French taxes. Poujade had started life as an ordinary laborer and had initially sympathized with Philippe Pétain, who collaborated with Adolf Hitler by leading Vichy France.
With only a limited education, Poujade adopted a number of conspiracy theories, including the conviction that the National Assembly was infested with corrupt profiteers, that France’s Grandes Ecoles were working against French interests, and that many of France’s political problems were caused by meddling from the American CIA. Both Poujade and Le Pen shared a natural sympathy with many of the right-wing populist ideas that had circulated widely in Europe in the lead-up to World War II, and that finally morphed into German and Italian Fascism.
Throughout his career, Le Pen attributed his popularity to a simple formula. “I say out loud,” he said frankly, “what you feel in your gut.”
The message had its appeal, particularly in a time of turmoil. Civilization requires repressing bestial instincts and that takes energy. Le Pen’s argument was to relax and let it all hang out. What he was really expressing, however, also had a lot to do with France’s traumatic experiences during the Algerian War and the dismantling of France’s colonial empire that came soon after.
The Algerian War, which signaled the ultimate end to French colonialism, deeply divided French society and ultimately led to a coup attempt on May 13, 1958, in which several French generals — including Raoul Salan, and Adm. Philippe Auboyneau, commanding France’s Mediterranean fleet, along with France’s former governor in Algeria, Jacques Soustelle — launched a revolt in an attempt to overthrow the government in Paris.
The coup eventually failed, but in the process it triggered the collapse of France’s Fourth Republic and the return of Charles de Gaulle as president of France’s Fifth Republic. De Gaulle was welcomed largely on the expectation that he would use the French Army to keep Algeria as part of France. Instead, De Gaulle decided to negotiate Algeria’s independence and an end to the war. Although it was the right thing to do, it led to decades of bitterness and anger dividing the French Right from the French Left.
Despite De Gaulle’s best efforts, France remained deeply conflicted concerning Algeria. Dissident officers in the French Army formed a rebellious terrorist group calling itself the OAS, the Organization of the Secret Army. The group repeatedly tried to assassinate De Gaulle; the novel Day of the Jackal and the film of the same name are based on one such attempt.
De Gaulle responded to the OAS by forming a “parallel” police force calling itself the SAC (Service d’Action Civique). The SAC gave the government the cover it needed to engage in assassinations against the OAS. It was eventually accused of also engaging in political fundraising and eventually in running various narcotics operations, including the French Connection, smuggling heroin into New York.
In the chaotic environment produced by the fight over Algeria, Le Pen took a leave of absence from the National Assembly and volunteered to join French paratroopers who had been thrown into a brutal campaign to stamp out Algeria’s FLN, the National Liberation Front, which was leading Algeria’s native resistance.
Le Pen’s role as a volunteer paratrooper led to several French newspapers, including the political newspaper Le Canard Enchainé, later accusing him of having engaged in torture. Le Pen sued the Canard for libel. Instead of yielding to the suit, the Canard dispatched a team of reporters to Algeria to find the people whom Le Pen had personally tortured.
One of the witnesses said that torture by the French paratroopers had been so vicious that he had tried to commit suicide by attempting to cut his jugular vein with a shard of glass from a shattered milk bottle. Lt. Le Pen, he said, had then allegedly returned to the hospital with some soldiers and demanded that the Algerian be released so that the torture could continue. A French army captain, who was the doctor in charge, interceded and told Le Pen that the French army was in command and that Le Pen should leave. The witnesses’ testimonies were bolstered by the fact that, after returning from Algiera, Le Pen had given a speech to the National Assembly arguing that torture had worked in Algeria and might work very well in France’s domestic judicial system.
The judge in the libel trial eventually ruled that the witnesses’ testimonies should be excluded since the French government had amnestied all war crimes in Algeria in1968. But, the judge added, Le Pen had made it clear in his various statements that he approved of torture, and therefore, he could not claim that he considered being labeled as a torturer to be libellous. The newspapers were in the clear.
In 1962, Le Pen lost his seat in the National Assembly and decided to go into private business. Joining in a partnership with Leon Gaultier, who had previously served with the Nazi Waffen SS, he launched a publishing company called SERP (Society for Study and Public Relations), which specialized in reprinting speeches by Hitler, Benito Mussolini, the Waffen SS, and various organs of the Nazi Third Reich. The company became a rallying point for Nazi sympathizers and extreme-right reactionaries still smarting over the loss of Algeria.
As Le Pen moved forward politically, most Parisians forgot about his involvement in SERP. A popular French TV interviewer, Michel Polac, questioned SERP’s activities on a leading TV interview show, Droite de Response (Right to Answer), and featured SERP in a 1980s broadcast, noting that the company was happily distributing Waffen SS marching songs. Shortly after the broadcast aired, I went by the store on Paris’s Rue du Bac. The store manager said, “The business has no connection to Mr. Le Pen’s work in the National Front. This is his personal business.”
By 1972, Le Pen had gathered enough extreme-rightists to launch his own party, the Front National, which presented itself as leaning to the right in conservative French politics. The neo-Nazis were still there, but the party began reaching out and trying to incorporate those members of French society who had more centrist views. Le Pen remained an admirer of Hitler’s Third Reich. At a press luncheon, I once asked him about his condemnation before a French court for having said that Hitler had been a democratically elected leader of Germany. “The French courts and I have a difference of opinion,” he replied.
Marine Le Pen’s reshaped version of her father’s party risks enticing less extremist conservatives and middle-of-the-road French voters into a political organization whose ultimate goals are far darker and more sinister than its current softened rhetoric suggests.
As Le Pen aged, his daughter, Marine, became more active in the National Front. Unlike her father, she had learned to moderate what she was willing to say out loud. In 1987, Jean-Marie Le Pen casually remarked that Hitler’s gas chambers were only a “detail” of World War II. Eventually, his controversial statements were too much both for the French public and for Marine Le Pen. Jean-Marie was ejected from the Front National and, in 2018, Marine Le Pen changed the party’s name to National Rally. By then, she had reconciled, at least in her role as a daughter, with her father.
To his credit, Jean-Marie Le Pen remained honest about his political ideology as a Nazi until the bitter end. Marine Le Pen, in softening the edges of her father’s beliefs in order to make his ideas more politically acceptable to a much larger segment of French society, may be less honest than her father, but she is also potentially far more dangerous. Her reshaped version of her father’s party risks enticing less extremist conservatives and middle-of-the-road French voters into a political organization whose ultimate goals are far darker and more sinister than its current softened rhetoric suggests.
German and Italian fascists began with seemingly reasonable plans to make railroads run on time. They ended by promoting systematic torture and Nazi gas chambers and dragging the entire planet into a war that led to the deaths of an estimated 50 to 85 million people. Even after the end result became obvious to everyone, Jean-Marie Le Pen insisted on continuing down the same path to disaster. Luckily, France chose to ignore his siren call to murderous authoritarian rule. Let’s hope that future leaders are wise enough to do the same.
