the man who didn’t want power

He saw himself as a hundred years old. On December 8, 2003, Jean-Marie Le Pen is still president of the National Front (FN) and intends to remain so for a long time. He is “only” 75 years old. That day, the former leader of the far-right party spoke of the death, the day before, of filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, muse of Adolf Hitler, at the age of 101. “You realize that she was still working at over 90 years old. Call me Jean-Marie Riefenstahl!” The joke is enormous, astonishing, as is often the case. She doesn’t make her daughter, Marine, laugh because every allusion to the Second World War on her part, even under the seal of irony – was it? –, reduces to nothing the efforts it is beginning to undertake to “demonize” it. But his devilish father is like this: born provocative, non-conformist, this political reprobate revels in extremism.

This is probably the image that will remain of the founder of the FN, who died at the age of 96: an extremist who did not want power. Each of his slip-ups – and they were numerous, often controlled, sometimes hazardous – removed him from the exercise of responsibilities. In 1987, his statement on the RTL microphone on the gas chambers, “a point of detail in the history of the Second World War”, for which he was condemned, made him inaccessible, preventing such a perspective. .

Le Pen becomes the pariah of French politics, he who dreamed of being invited to the good tables of respectability. He, the “little poor man” of Trinité-sur-Mer, the orphan ward of the nation installed within the bourgeois walls of the Montretout villa, in Saint-Cloud. He, the former legionnaire in Indochina and Algeria, where he was accused of torture, the youngest deputy in France in 1956, five times presidential candidate – in 2002, he reached the second round of the supreme election… Leader of a party which has continued to gain power, capable of making or breaking majorities, particularly after the dissolution of 1997, he claimed to be treated as an equal by the great leaders of the RIGHT. He remained, in fact, only a troublemaker kept away by a “sanitary cordon”. Was his verbal, and sometimes physical, violence only an expression of his spite?

All his life, the “Menhir”, endowed with an imposing physique and a bellicose ardor, made provocation his course of action. From his childhood, he distinguished himself as a notorious rowdy who bothered the Trinitaines. Later, at the Corpo, the association of law students in the Latin Quarter, which he chaired in 1949, he was noted for his schoolboy cheekiness, but also for his outbursts against the communists when he drank too much. It was especially during the legislative campaign of 1956, under the banner of Pierre Poujade, leader of a revolt movement of artisans and traders, the UDCA, that Le Pen prowled, twenty-five years ahead of the FN, the basis of its anti-system rhetoric: anti-Semitic connotations, rampant xenophobia, media phobia… Poujadism is its real political matrix.

Elected to the Palais-Bourbon at the age of 27, he was relegated to the far right. It is under the same label that we find him campaign director of the lawyer Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour, nostalgic for Pétain and French Algeria, during the presidential election of 1965. In 1974, it was he , this time, black bandage over his blind eye, who is a candidate in the name of the National Front, a party created two years earlier by individuals from the depths of the country: nostalgic for the years 1930 and the Vichy regime, heirs of Poujadism, inconsolable of French Algeria, pagans and fundamentalist Catholics…

Le Pen does not lack charisma thanks to unparalleled eloquence coupled with great classical culture. His strength? Unite small groups who hate each other, resurrect a sulphurous extreme right since 1945, and succeed in propelling the FN to the forefront by dynamiting the political landscape. Trained under another Republic where television did not exist, he is gifted with an instinct that subsequent generations lack. He knows how to exploit the flaws of a French society losing its bearings: his talent consists of making the exclusion of which he claims to be a victim the driving force behind his electoral rise, by presenting himself as the spokesperson for the little people and the left-behind. -on account of emerging globalization. And by designating a scapegoat: immigration.

His latest success is to have ensured a future for his party where the cult of the leader reigns, by passing the torch to his youngest daughter, Marine, in 2011. “What remains of him today on the political level ?, notes however the political scientist Luc Rouban

. The National Rally is different from the FN in terms of its electorate, even if it retains national preference as its ideological base. On the economic level, it is an evolving party which positions itself on the ground of the social right and turns its back on the liberalism of Jean-Marie Le Pen. His problem is no longer his marginality, but his credibility.”

For younger generations, the old adventurer is ancient history. A sign: Jordan Bardella only met twice with the founder of the party he chairs today.