Jean-Marie Le Pen, founding father of the modern French far right, died at the age of 96. In a career that spanned over seven decades, he witnessed, participated in, and shaped some of the major moments of French politics. He did so, first, as a paratrooper during the French Indochina War, next, as one of France’s youngest MPs and campaign strategist in the 1950s, and then as the founder of the National Front – Europe’s most prominent far right political formation – which he headed from its creation in 1972 until his retirement in 2011.
Early days
As a soldier in the Foreign Legion, he participated in the Dien Bien Phu battle, a military defeat that precipitated France’s departure from Vietnam. He was also sent to Suez in 1956, but reached after the ceasefire. He then joined politics and ran for parliament on the list of Pierre Poujade, leader of the UDCA (Union for the Defence of Shopkeepers and Artisans), a short-lived anti-elite far right populist movement that tapped into post-war discontent among the working class and opposed big business, unions and the state.
In 1957, he enlisted in the Foreign Legion as an intelligence officer and was sent to Algeria, where he participated in torture, a charge he denied all his life. The loss of Algeria left a deep impression on him, and he would ride on colonial nostalgia and postcolonial resentment to rally the scattered elements of the French far right.
After 1945, the French far right, associated with the anti-Semitic and fascist Petainist regime, was defeated but not extinguished. Its members faced trials, purges and extrajudicial retributions following France’s liberation. In 1945, Robert Brasillach, a French journalist and author, was executed by court order for collaboration with the Nazis. In the aftermath, the French far right disintegrated into a patchwork of groupuscules, political and militaristic formations, social movements and publications.
What bound them together was a shared narrative of persecution and a shared worldview shaped by racism, anti-Semitism, anti-Communism, and anti-parliamentarism. This mix of resentments and ideas provided the ground on which the French far right would rebuild itself, and remained constant features of its ideology through its various iterations in the decades that followed. This is the sociological and political universe that Jean-Marie Le Pen navigated after the French Indochina War, first as a street brawler, and then as a party operative.
His early political career was marked by electoral defeats and disappointment with his mentor, Pierre Poujade. While the UDCA failed to capitalise on its early performance – it won 52 seats with 12% of the vote in 1956 – it provided a template for the National Front, with its platform based on anti-elite rhetoric, racism and imperial nostalgia, and revolt against the welfare state. It also provided a stylistic template. Poujade was a charismatic orator who combined social and economic resentment with nationalism and xenophobia, engaged in personality cult, prizing “common sense” and “instinct” over intellectual reasoning. His appeal resonated with voters on both the right and the left, another characteristic of the far right.
Also read: The Past, Present and Future of France’s Self-Inflicted Far-Right Surge
The Algerian War gave the far right the opportunity to build a new nationalist imagination beyond Petain and the shameful history of collaboration. The fear of loss of empire, Communist expansion in the colonies and the need to maintain France’s status in the world helped cement together far-right factions: the monarchists, the Vichy and French Algeria veterans, the Poujadists and the Catholic traditionalists, the anti-Masons and the neo-Nazis.
For the far right, Algeria was more than a colony. It represented the dream of a lost, betrayed fraternal Southern society, a pre-industrial universe steeped in natural beauty. They cultivated nostalgia for a well-ordered white society where the colonised expressed loyalty to their masters, an old world where privileges were respected, in contrast to a fast-changing, industrial, capitalistic, and technocratic North.
While Algerian independence in 1962 deprived them of their leading cause, the campaign for maintaining Algeria French helped the French far right to rise from its ashes. It revived old nationalist fantasies and grievances, which were refocused on the issue of immigration after the war. After whipping up fear and anger against people who had been colonised, it sought to do the same against those who were now coming over to “colonise” France. The loss of territory abroad was substituted with the fear of losing territory at home.
Temporary withdrawal from politics
Throughout the 1960s, Jean-Marie Le Pen began to federate all the radical right-wing xenophobic factions around the question of immigration. In 1965, he headed the campaign of Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancourt, lawyer, far-right politician and former minister in the Petain cabinet, who ran in a presidential election with little success. After the defeat, Le Pen temporarily withdrew from politics and founded a media consulting firm that produced and distributed recordings of Nazi and far-left chants.
In 1972, he founded the National Front (FN), a federation of far-right factions that included former collaborators, ex-Waffen-SS, Petainists, Algeria nostalgists and various revolutionary nationalists. Most far-right organisations dissolved themselves and joined the ranks of this new political party, which defined itself as the new ‘national opposition’, bringing together the ‘social, popular and national right’. The FN borrowed its symbol from the Italian Social Movement, a far-right party that also provided financial support to the FN.
Historian Peter Davies defined the FN’s core ideology as ‘defensive nationalism’: a cult of ancestors and iconic Christian and royal figures of the past, such as Joan of Arc or Clovis, a biological concept of the nation, a denunciation of the dangers of globalisation and immigration, and a xenophobic and antisemitic discourse. It favoured the construction of a European cultural identity, but opposed European institutions.
From there, Le Pen took centre-stage and continued his parliamentary career. The returns were modest. France’s electoral system does not favour small fringe formations. The FN struggled to win more than a handful of seats throughout the 1970s and 1980s. However, its political presence was not limited to its parliamentary strength. Its constant hammering on immigration and Le Pen’s penchant for verbal provocation placed him as a national political figure. The FN’s strategy consisted of pushing nationalism by exploiting social change, connecting unemployment and crime to immigration. It engaged in culture wars and incited its opponents to adopt their issues and their vocabulary. Resorting to national populism, it sought to appeal to voters on both the right and the left.
Le Pen contested five presidential elections. His performance culminated in 2002, when he qualified for the second round of the election, beating the incumbent socialist prime minister, Lionel Jospin, by a whisker. His qualification triggered a massive reaction in France. Hundreds of thousands marched through the country’s major cities in protest of the rise of the far right and the danger it posed. He was soundly defeated by incumbent President Jacques Chirac, who was re-elected with 82% of the vote. These protest marches, in which this author participated as a student in Paris, contrast sharply with the acceptance of his daughter Marine Le Pen’s status as a front-runner in presidential bids. Marine Le Pen has run three times and recently more than doubled her father’s 2002 performance without generating protests on the scale he once did.
Once a political outcast
Through the 1980s and 1990s, the FN embraced its status as a political outcast. Its strategy was to use carefully crafted provocative slogans and public statements, owning their racism and anti-Semitism. Le Pen was convicted in 1987 for Holocaust denial, after stating that Nazi gas chambers were ‘a detail’ in history. Through such statements, the FN organised its ostracisation to reinforce its status as a spokesperson for excluded opinions. It constantly played on victimisation and conspiracy theories, converting all criticism into conspiracy evidence.
This hardline stance would have its limits. The centralisation of power within the party and the personality cult of its leader alienated some members. Despite adversity, the FN turned the tide, seizing the opportunity of departing factions to label them as racist and extreme, thus initiating a process of normalisation or mainstreaming of the party. The ageing patriarch then gradually made way for his daughter, who sought to rebuild a divided party, diversify its electoral base, and normalise the French far right. According to political scientist Nonna Mayer, the FN sought “to get rid of the labels of racism, anti-Semitism and extremism attached to it by its opponents, and to show the FN was ‘a party like any other'”.
By the time Marine took the reins of the party in 2011, Le Pen was an outdated figure, a tired founding father whose racist and anti-Semitic public diatribes became an embarrassment to his own party. In 2015, he was formally expelled from the party he had founded, when he repeated the comment that got him convicted decades earlier.
Toward the end of his life, Le Pen embodied the old far right: radical, aggressive, provocative, openly racist and anti-Semitic. The far right today is far more polished and polite than it used to be, and it would like people to forget that these traits connect to constitutive elements of the modern European far right that it has never abandoned – nationalism, nativism, xenophobia and a penchant for populist and authoritarian style of leadership. Le Pen’s political style, antics and rhetoric also prefigured contemporary right-wing populist figures across the world. He helped us remember what the far right looks like when it is not wearing a mask.
Gilles Verniers is Karl Loewenstein Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor at Amherst College. Views are personal.
