Skip to main content

This article is a translation of the original French version that appeared in Mediapart on January 7, 2025.

Jean-Marie Le Pen died on Tuesday, January 7, at the age of 96. The founder of the National Front (NF, from “Front National,” which became the Rassemblement National, or National Rally, in 2018) died on the 10th anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo attack, which killed 12 people, including cartoonists Cabu, Charb, and Tignous, who had made no secret of their hatred of the man who had been the driving force and face of the far-right revival in France after the Second World War.

His death comes at a time when his daughter, Marine Le Pen, is on a visit to Mayotte, where her eternal appeals to fight immigration are echoed all the more favorably because they are now barely distinguishable from the government’s own messages.

Throughout his life, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s racist and anti-Semitic statements, downplaying Nazi crimes and praising colonization, have earned him numerous convictions (see sidebar). His epitaph could be one of his favorite phrases: “I am the most hated man in France.” It was no empty boast.

In a society which includes a segment with very right-wing views, it may be difficult for younger people to understand just how divisive was the man whom historian Grégoire Kauffmann dubbed “the devil of the Republic,” a nickname that would stick.

Those who hated him and those who adored him can agree on one thing: this would-be Caesar demonstrated that even with institutions as centralized as those of the Fifth Republic, it was possible to change France without governing it.

His first and longest-running political passion was his hatred of Gaullism. This did not prevent him from calling for a “yes” vote in the 1962 referendum on establishing the direct election of the president by universal suffrage. The issue at that time was not the institutions, which lay at the heart of Gaullist thinking, but rather the idea that the [former resistance leader] General [de Gaulle] represented an act of sedition against [the late Nazi collaborator and Vichy regime leader, Marshall Philippe] Pétain.


A Lifetime of Convictions

Throughout his political career, Jean-Marie Le Pen made racist, anti-Semitic statements and denied Nazi crimes. These statements earned him a long list of convictions.

In 1971, Jean-Marie Le Pen was convicted for the first time of war crime apologia. The record publishing company he had set up in 1963 had released an album entitled Le IIIe Reich: Voix et chants de la révolution allemande [The 3rd Reich: Voices and Songs of the German Revolution], and the accompanying documentation claimed that “Adolf Hitler’s rise to power and that of the National Socialist Party [had been] characterized by a powerful mass movement, thoroughly popular and democratic, which triumphed following regular electoral contests.”

On September 13, 1987, he declared that the existence of gas chambers was “a minor detail in the history of the Second World War.” These remarks were repeated several times and led to two civil convictions, in 1991 and 1999. In criminal court, he was convicted on appeal in 2017 for denying a crime against humanity after repeating the phrase in 2015. The conviction was upheld in 2018 by the Court of Cassation [a parallel body to the Supreme Court in France designed to bring an end to cases that have gone down and then back up the chain of appeals all over again, designed to finally “break” (casser) these long-running impasses that the French system of civil law allows].

He was convicted on appeal in 2012 for having claimed in 2005 that the German occupation of France had not been “particularly inhumane.” In 1993, Jean-Marie Le Pen was convicted of public insult for his 1988 pun, Durafour crématoire [“Durafour crematorium,” a play on words: four means “oven” in French], aimed at Michel Durafour, then Minister for the Civil Service.

On November 28, 2018, at the age of 90, he was again convicted for remarks made in 2016 and 2017 targeting homosexuals. In 2022, on the other hand, he was acquitted on appeal for having attacked in 2014 several personalities engaged in combating the extreme right, and said of Patrick Bruel: “Listen, next time we’ll do a whole oven batch!”


At the heart of this was the idea that Gaullist national unity was merely a divisive factor because it did not correspond to the organic conception of the nation so near and dear to the extreme right—an idea that Le Pen hammered home in his bestselling Memoirs, having failed to ever produce a doctrinal text.

With regard to institutions, he took his revenge without power, managing to bring about many changes in an electoral system designed to ensure stability. As for de Gaulle, he pursued those who laid claim to him—the final irony being that he was politically eliminated by the likes of Florian Philippot, who was building his political brand by unduly capturing this legacy.

A Huge Ego

In unpublished interviews with Robert Ménard, Le Pen explained former French President Jacques Chirac’s refusal to ally with him as being due to the fact that, before the 1988 presidential election, the latter had discovered that he was, in fact, of Jewish descent. Likewise, Le Pen, who initially had no animosity towards Israel, became hostile to it not for ideological reasons, but because he imagined that a Jewish plot against him explained the Israeli authorities’ hostility to his visiting their country. Such was Le Pen: extreme right-wing schemas structured his worldview, but they were articulated at the whim of a huge ego.

Le Pen saw his life as an adventure in which he was the hero. He felt culturally superior to many politicians, but this was largely based on what he had learned in his youth. It was a classical culture that impressed his regular customers with its Latin locutions, but deliberately ignored the humanities and social sciences.

His ambition was more measured than his self-esteem: according to former associate Roland Gaucher, who had a complex relationship with him, he had dreamt of being Jacques Chirac’s Defense Minister in 1986, then of qualifying for the run-off presidential election in 1988. But he seemed to have never given serious thought as to how to actually run the country.

Le Pen always said that it was better to lose based on one’s own ideas than to win based on those of others.

Jean-Marie Le Pen had what you might call a Dracula complex: he would have liked to have been given up for dead and buried so many times, to cross deserts and oceans, and to come back stronger and stronger to scare off those standing under the lights. When no one wants to meet you officially, but everyone wants to meet you in secret, all that’s left for you to do is enjoy being the “devil of the Republic.”

Le Pen always said that it was better to lose based on one’s own ideas than to win based on those of others, and here again, in one of those formulas he liked to repeat, he maintained that he was “extremely upright.” After many adventures with splinter groups, he attached his name to the entity with which he was to be associated for decades: the National Front (NF).

It is worth noting the state of purgatory from which Jean-Marie Le Pen pulled the far right out of. Following the liberation of France, not only were most far-right movements banned, but the crime of indignité nationale (national indignity) could even be declared propaganda in favor of “racism.” Having been elected France’s youngest member of parliament in 1956, he saw his camp plunge back into insignificance: collectively, the various far-right lists accounted for 0.92% of the vote in the 1967 legislative elections.

Le Pen had convinced himself, and led many to believe, that he alone deserved the credit for having founded the NF in 1972. He tied this claim to the several groups that also used the term “national front” in their names and which he had helped run during the Algerian War. He also portrayed himself as the first to denounce immigration and as the one who patiently united scattered nationalist forces and brought them into public life. However, this entire narrative was false.

It was the neo-fascists of the New Order (NO, for “Ordre Nouveau”) who founded the NF and sought Le Pen out as one of its three co-presidents. When, in the first few weeks, he tried to usurp them, former colleague François Brigneau was sent to him by the NO, along with a document from its leadership, stating that Brigneau would be the NF president if Le Pen did not compromise.

It was then his right-hand man, former colleague Victor Barthélemy, who built the NF’s propaganda machine up to the point that it became “the party of Jean-Marie Le Pen.” At first, he was not a believer in the immigration issue, which was almost imposed on him by his subsequent number two, François Duprat. He only managed to rally his political family together patiently, especially after the first victories in Dreux in 1982, recorded by Jean-Pierre Stirbois, his number two after Duprat. The electorate that definitively established Jean-Marie Le Pen on the electoral scene after Europeans went to the polls in 1984 was by no means that of small-town people in contact with immigrants: among the best results were recorded in places such as Neuilly-sur-Seine and Paris’ 16th Arrondissement.

The Tribune and His Voters

But it was Le Pen in fact who succeeded, for the first time in French political history, not only in securing the unity of the far right, but also in its electoral success. Until the schism at the end of 1998 with his number two, Bruno Mégret, he was the arbiter and balancing point among all the factions—the split being primarily due to the fact that the NF president seemed to want only to work on presidential campaigns, at the expense of other elections, and without even caring if he could win them. But he was such a driving force behind the vote that in the 1988 and 1989 elections, Front-style lists ran under the name “LEPEN,” for “Liste entente populaire et nationale” (Popular and National Accord List).

But his cult of personality is misunderstood. When he campaigned at the end of the 1980s, with pyramidal podiums and torch-bearing entrances, people cried fascism—it is absolutely certain that the effect was intended, both in its attractive and repulsive dimensions. And yet, at the same time, commentators kept saying that this was a “protest vote.” The alchemy he concocted was, in fact, more complex.

In 1984, 49% of NF voters who headed to the polls in the European election chose to vote NF because of Le Pen; in the 1995 presidential election, only 18% did so, while 60% chose him because of his platform. By way of comparison, 46% of those who voted for the outgoing Prime Minister, Édouard Balladur, chose him because of his personality, and 39% because of his platform.

So, objectively speaking, these are the Le Pen voters who are most committed to the project: to say that they are protesting or following a charismatic leader is simplistic. Similarly, candidate Marine Le Pen, who has been oversold for years as having revitalized the NF’s credibility, fares poorer than her father among college graduates and educated professionals. The young upstarts who came to came to believe they could get something out of the NF between 2011 and the ousting of Florian Philippot in 2017, and who argued that Jean-Marie Le Pen was harming the NF’s credibility, deserved the scorn of the former Poujadist MP.

Moreover, his political talent was not at all that of a visionary—a quality which, even when their relationship was at its worst, his daughter would publicly credit him with possessing, in order to show that the NF was first on the scene in terms of the immigration issue. He who loved saying over and over again, “I was right,” and to portray himself as a diviner, managed to his electoral forecasts wrong all throughout his life—he contented himself with changing his prophecies after the fact, and his countless naive people who inhabit political party headquarters and editorial offices would then be amazed at his prescience.

What Is Lepenism?

If Lepenism has endured, it is because it has been multifaceted.

Nothing was more inaccurate than Le Pen’s slogan: “He says out loud what you think deep down.” In fact, Le Pen was a step ahead. His racist provocations created such a media brouhaha that those who felt that immigration was a problem could tell themselves that they were not as violent ideologically, but nonetheless justified in their protests. Le Pen’s jibes were like a maieutic for voters, helping them to couch their rejection of others in their break with the prevailing political and cultural system.

Le Pen offered voters an unexpected feature of the political system: the FN effectively functioned as a “lobby party.” There was no need to put extremists in power (in the 1990s, up to 75% of those polled considered it a threat to democracy). By offering them a minority bloc capable of playing the spoiler, each parliamentary majority was defeated, and each new one rushed to make new laws on immigration and security—that is, voters got the legislative change they wanted without the annoyance of having extremists in power.

The process ended up with Manuel Valls and Laurent Wauquiez, in other words, the agony of the left and the right of government and conviction. Then came the blur … and now the far right stands at the gates of power.

To crack the political system, Jean-Marie Le Pen did not have to produce a doctrine. He was a genuine product of the national-populist current which emerged in the 1880s in reaction to France’s loss of Alsace-Lorraine in the wake of the 1870 war [with Prussia]. Le Pen figured out how to bring the anxieties of transnationalization and postmodernity into this framework, overexciting French unitary culture in response.

Nostalgia has a future.


Photo made by John Chrobak using “convention présidentielle front national, lille, 25 février – 2” by staffpresi_esj licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.