How ‘the most hated man in France’ became Trump ahead of his time

Robert Zaretsky
January 9, 2025

News that Jean-Marie Le Pen — one of the founders of France’s extreme rightwing political party, the National Front — died on Tuesday came as a surprise to no one; he was 96 and in brittle health. What is surprising — or, at least, should be — is how awkward Le Pen’s death has proven to be for the nation’s political leaders on the right and in the center.

Consider the reactions posted by leading conservatives. The Gaullist Bruno Retailleau, currently serving as the Interior Minister, suggested that “Regardless of one’s opinion of Jean Marie Le Pen, his impact on history is undeniable.” A fellow Gaullist, Éric Ciotti, allowed that while “gray zones” marked Le Pen’s life, he was nevertheless a man of “courage, strong intuitions, and sincere patriotism.” François Bayrou, the centrist who now leads a fragile coalition government, went out on a limb, noting that Le Pen was irrefutably “a leading figure in our country’s political life.” Inching a bit further out, he added that “we knew the kind of political opponent he was.”

The press office of yet another centrist — in this case, President Emmanuel Macron — revealed to those who had been asleep since the 1950s, that Le Pen “played a public role in our country for nearly 70 years.”  As for the nature of that role, the statement forthrightly declared that “it is for History [yes, with a capital “H”] to judge it.”

Predictably, the declarations made by leading figures of the National Rally — the kinder and gentler name that Marine Le Pen gave to the party she inherited from her father in 2011 — were more enthusiastic. Yet they were also circumspect, keeping mum over the “gray zones” evoked by Ciotti. The National Rally’s president, Jordan Bardella, set the tone by praising Le Pen as a man “who always served France, defending its identity and sovereignty as a soldier in Indochina and Algeria, as well as a tribune for the people in the National Assembly.”

This discomfiture of conservative and moderate politicians following Le Pen’s death reflects a political landscape utterly transformed, almost entirely for the worse, by the impact of the National Front since its creation in 1972. A rapid summary of Le Pen’s words and deeds reveals the extent of this change.

First, before his engagement in national politics, Le Pen engaged in acts of what we now call enhanced interrogation during the Battle of Algiers in 1957. At first, Le Pen acknowledged the accusations — “I have nothing to hide,” he declared in 1962. “We tortured because we had to.” Though he subsequently retracted this confession, the historian Fabrice Riceputi’s recent book Le Pen and Torture: The Battle of Algiers, a History Against Forgetting, cites dozens of documents revealing that Le Pen was a serial torturer during his six months of service.

Second, while the media, especially in the United States, identify Le Pen as the movement’s sole founder, this is not quite the case. Instead, the paternity of the movement is largely that of Francois Brigneau, a far-right journalist, Holocaust denier, and former member of the Milice, Vichy’s paramilitary force tasked with hunting down members of the Resistance and Jews. After serving jail time after the war for his acts of collaboration, Brigneau helped launch the Front National as a political party inspired by the antisemitic and neo-fascist Ordre Nouveau, or New Order. He then played a key role in promoting Le Pen, who had already established a reputation as public speaker and rabble-rouser, as the movement’s leader. Brigneau’s role soon faded, but not his foul values, as Le Pen repeatedly made clear.

Third, Le Pen made his lasting attachment to those values — if that is the right word — in 1984 when he affirmed that the gas chambers at Auschwitz amounted to little more than “a detail of history in the history of the Second World War.” This was not the last time he made this claim. A serial negationist, Le Pen was repeatedly found guilty by French courts for the crime of denying crimes against humanity, as well as for claiming the Nazi occupation of France was “not especially inhumane.”

Fourth, Le Pen’s racism extended well beyond Jews. “I believe in the inequality of races,” he announced in 1996. An amateur historian, Le Pen explained that the study of the past reveals that “they don’t have the same capacity or same level of historical development.” Further, Le Pen mocked AIDS victims as “sidaïques” — a pejorative coinage spun from “sida,” the French acronym for AIDS — and insisted that, like lepers, they should be rounded up and confined to camps. Le Pen did not add that Vichy, the antisemitic and collaborationist regime he persistently defended, treated French and foreign Jews in a similar fashion.

Fifth and finally, the dark legacy of the individual who took perverse pride in the title “the most hated man in France” runs deep. The fringe party he helped to launch has become, under his daughter, the largest opposition party in the National Assembly. So large, in fact, that it brought down, by a vote of no confidence, the previous minority government led by Michel Barnier, and now holds the same power of life and death over François Bayrou’s minority government. This explains, depending on one’s perspective, the care or cowardice shown in public statements following the news of Le Pen’s death.

But something else is at work. Le Pen’s tireless and baseless warnings that immigration from former French territories in Africa and Asia represented an existential threat to the nation changed not just political discourse, but political reality itself in France. A claim that was once extreme and execrable has become commonplace and conventional. When conservative and centrist politicians, ranging from the former president Nicolas Sarkozy to the current president Emmanuel Macron, eagerly play the immigration card to win votes, France no longer resembles itself. Tellingly, the newspaper Le Monde described Le Pen as “Trump avant l’heure,” or a Trump ahead of his time.

That time seems to have come, and the certain idea of France — one based on the universal values of liberty, equality, and fraternity — that so many people from so many countries held for so many generations, now seems as threatened in our sister republic as they do in our own country.

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