Jean-Marie Le Pen revived extremist politics in France

IN HISFNFN 19th-century mansion on a bluff overlooking Paris, Jean-Marie Le Pen kept in his cluttered office a collection of nautical memorabilia, including a huge pair of brass, stand-mounted binoculars. It is easy to imagine the far-right French leader, who died on January 7th at the age of 96, training his angry gaze at the city below: overrun, he would rant, like the country, by immigrants, Muslims, Jews, gay people and all others he judged undesirable. More than arguably any other post-war leader in Europe, over his seven decades in public life Mr Le Pen was responsible for reviving an extreme form of xenophobic politics, which today has become increasingly mainstream.Born in Brittany to a father who was a fisherman, Mr Le Pen studied law in Paris and then was a paratrooper in Indochina in the 1950s. He was first elected to the National Assembly in 1956, under the Fourth Republic, after falling in with an early populist movement led by Pierre Poujade. A blustering figure with a broad frame, Mr Le Pen fought in Algeria, to keep it French, later conceding that while there he “tortured because it had to be done”.Mr Le Pen’s lasting influence on French politics, however, really dates from the 1970s, after he co-founded the National Front () in 1972. In 1986, thanks in large part to newly-changed electoral rules, Mr Le Pen and his group of assorted extremists, nativists and colonial apologists secured 35 parliamentary seats. It marked the beginning of what the French called the “” of minds: in effect, the growing acceptance of an increasingly blunt public discourse against immigration. Mr Le Pen himself went on to stand for the presidency five times, securing in 2002 a place in the second round against Jacques Chirac, to widespread shock and consternation.Excess marked everything Mr Le Pen did, whether he was blasting out Breton songs after dinner with friends in the family mansion, or relishing the provocations that often landed him in court. He declared that he had “never considered Pétain [Vichy France’s collaborationist wartime leader] a traitor” and, most notoriously, that the gas chambers were a mere “detail” of the second world war. For his daughter, Marine Le Pen, who took over the in 2011 and embarked on a project to transform it from a pariah movement into a party ready to govern, this repeated claim was the last straw. She split with her father, evicted him from the party, and in 2018 renamed it the National Rally.In the end, the pair were reconciled. Family ties prevailed over political disagreements and ambitions. Jean-Marie Le Pen was a provocateur, who thrived on confrontation and outrage and never sought power. Upon Mr Le Pen’s death the National Rally called its founding father “an intrepid and indomitable fighter”. In an unusually measured statement, President Emmanuel Macron left unsaid everything he doubtless really wanted to say. Mr Le Pen, he wrote, “played a role in the public life of our country for nearly 70 years, which it will now be for history to judge”.An early judgment would be that Le Pen senior thundered about on the toxic political fringes at a time when his discourse was rejected outright by mainstream parties and a majority of French—and European—public opinion. But he also laid the foundations for a movement that, in purging itself of its extreme elements and imagery, has morphed into a form of increasingly accepted hard-right nationalism.In a poll on January 5th of the 50 favourite French public figures, the only politicians who featured were Ms Le Pen and Jordan Bardella, her lieutenant. Jean-Marie Le Pen inhabited the unfrequentable margins. Ms Le Pen has never looked closer to power.