I once asked National Front (FN) party founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, during 1992 regional elections, about the party’s slogan, “Quand nous arriverons, ils partiront,” which roughly translates as “When we get in, they will get out.” Who did he mean by “they,” I asked Le Pen. He would not answer directly, but drew complicit laughter from supporters by saying: “Everyone here but you knows what that means.”
The extreme-right rabble rouser might finally be dead at 96 after a long, incendiary political career, but those nationalist anti-immigration ideas are alive and kicking in 21st-century France.
Indeed, Le Pen managed to divide the nation one last time in death, as he had in life. Left-wing politicians voiced outrage at what they branded an unacceptable tribute by the new centrist French Prime Minister Francois Bayrou, who wrote on X that whatever their differences, Le Pen was a major figure in French political life and that “you knew when you fought against him what a fighter he was.”
Ironically, his demise might clear the stage for his daughter, Marine Le Pen, to ascend to the French presidency, having supposedly cleansed the party he created — and from which she expelled him in 2015 — of its racist baggage. Opinion polls suggest she would romp to victory against all comers if an early presidential election were held now. However, it must be said that these are only snapshots of a politically paralyzed country in a grumpy mood, not an infallible barometer.
The fact that Bayrou and French President Emmanuel Macron felt obliged to be at least polite about Jean-Marie Le Pen was an acknowledgment of his daughter’s influence over present-day politics rather than a tribute to his career. Their awkward condolences — Macron said “history will judge” his legacy — owed less to the injunction not to speak ill of the dead than to their eagerness to show her respect in the hope that she would not topple another minority government after she pulled the plug on former French prime minister Michel Barnier’s short-lived cabinet last month.
Having killed off her increasingly erratic father politically, Marine Le Pen was eventually reconciled with him in private on condition that he stayed out of public view. He did not entirely keep his part of the bargain, continuing to rant on a video blog and was only last year filmed singing at his home with a rock group with alleged neo-Nazi associations.
The former paratrooper with a piratical black eyepatch, who served in France’s dirty war against Algerian nationalists in the 1950s, founded the FN in 1972 with a ragbag of veterans of the Vichy regime that collaborated with Nazi Germany, unrepentant colonialists who had violently opposed independence for Algeria and Catholic fundamentalists. They embodied the darker side of history that most of society, steeped in former French president Charles de Gaulle’s myth of a France united in resistance, preferred not to talk about.
Fiery oratory and calculated provocations — dismissing Nazi gas chambers as “a detail” of history and reveling in antisemitic puns — propelled Jean-Marie Le Pen within three decades from the obscurity of the far-right lunatic fringe to the run-off round of a presidential election. He received a helping hand in the 1980s from socialist former French president Francois Mitterrand, who encouraged public television to air the far-right bruiser in a tactic to divide the conservative opposition. By introducing proportional representation for parliamentary elections in 1986, Mitterrand let the FN into the National Assembly for the first time.
Le Pen’s shock breakthrough in the 2002 presidential election, forcing socialist former French prime minister Lionel Jospin into third place, triggered a wave of protests and a moment of national unity that led to Gaullist former French president Jacques Chirac’s overwhelming re-election. After five presidential campaigns and still more court appearances, the old war horse’s time was up.
Like some diabolical Moses, Jean-Marie Le Pen saw the promised land from afar, but never set foot in it, because he had sinned. Convicted multiple times of inciting racial hatred and discrimination, Holocaust denial and apology of war crimes, the godfather of the French extreme right preferred to stir prejudice and make himself a pariah, rather than softening his tone to win public office. He knew how to sound the dog whistle to a deep undercurrent of anti-Arab racism in France. Everything was the fault of the immigrants — unemployment, crime and disrespect for authority.
Many mainstream conservative politicians came to adopt his talk of “out-of-control immigration.” He might never have won power, but he changed France’s political discourse, making the self-proclaimed homeland of human rights a less welcoming, less tolerant place.
Marine Le Pen has chosen the opposite path. She has spent more than a decade detoxifying the party’s image in a process she dubbed “dediabolisation,” literally “de-demonization.” She changed the party’s name, replacing “Front” with “Rally” (Rassemblement), a word long owned by the Gaullists. When policies such as leaving the euro or quitting the EU scared the middle-classes and proved vote losers, she dropped them.
Unburdened by the history of her father’s generation, the single mother dumped the party’s opposition to abortion and gay marriage, full-throatedly supported Israel and positioned herself as a champion of secularism against political Islam. The National Rally won 11 million votes in last year’s snap parliamentary election, as she keeps reminding the political class.
Marine Le Pen’s dog whistle is more subtle than her father’s, but a growing number in France are barking to her tune.
Paul Taylor is a senior visiting fellow at the European Policy Centre
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