Marine Le Pen thought the National Front project needed toning down, and spoke of “detoxifying” it, but deep down she knew Le Pen’s bile had a huge constituency, writes Nabila Ramdani. [GETTY]
Being implicated in acts of torture and the murder of an Arab Muslim nationalist were not mentioned when Jean-Marie Le Pen was honoured in a military church following his death on January 7, at the age of 96. Those packing Notre-Dame du Val-de-Grâce in Paris – a Roman Catholic place of worship that serves the French Army – were instead expected to remember him as a respectable veteran.
Except that forgetting about the evil carried out by Le Pen, the far-right politician, is something that his closest supporters are already finding hard to do. They are in fact regretting that he was expelled from his own dynastic party when his Nazi sympathies allegedly grew “too extreme”.
This says everything about the position of the National Rally (RN), which he founded as the National Front (FN), and its place in contemporary France. It is now the biggest single party in the Paris National Assembly, and one of the principal reasons for this is the way Le Pen brought grotesque ideologies into mainstream politics.
He was “fired” from the FN in 2015 after refusing to back down from his repeated claims that the Holocaust was “a detail of history”. Le Pen also said that the Third Reich Occupation of France – when thousands of Jews and other French citizens were entrained to the gas chambers – “was not particularly inhuman”.
His daughter, Marine Le Pen, had taken over the leadership of the FN, and insisted she was deeply upset by such words – ones that earned him convictions for a range of crimes, including anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and generally spreading racist hatred.
As someone who had interviewed both father and daughter at various stages of their careers – including when both were seeking to become president of France– it was abundantly clear to me that the alleged outrage was pure theatre.
In my book, Fixing France: How to Repair a Broken Republic, I call the drama “a staged schism”, and Madame Le Pen’s reaction to her father’s death absolutely proves this. On the expulsion of her beloved mentor, she now says: “I will never forgive myself for this decision”, because “it caused him immense pain”.
There was no mention of the suffering of Ahmed Moulay, the 47-year-old Algerian who was subjected to electric shock treatment before being murdered. It was on March 3, 1957, that French troops including Le Pen entered Moulay’s home in the Casbah in Algiers. The Algerian was tortured in front of his wife and six children. A Hitler Youth knife engraved with “J.M.Le Pen” and “1er REP”, the initials of the 1st Foreign Parachutist Division, Le Pen’s unit, was found at the scene by Mohamed Moulay, the murder victim’s 12-year-old son.
In November 1962, Jean-Marie Le Pen told Combat, “I have nothing to hide. We tortured because it had to be done. When someone is brought to you who has planted twenty bombs that could explode at any moment and who will not talk, you use all the methods at your disposal to make him talk.”
Some of Le Pen’s alleged victims even contributed to a book called Tortured By Le Pen, by the Algerian historian Hamid Bousselham, in which they said they were electrocuted, beaten, and subjected to water torture.
The atrocities evoked Le Pen’s Nazi fetish – he was a notorious Adolf Hitler nostalgist right up until his last days – as well as his intense hatred of Arabs and Berbers who dared to oppose colonialism. The former intelligence officer and paratrooper once described his role in Algeria as being: “a mixture between being an SS officer and a Gestapo agent.”
Descendants of those who defeated the French in the North African country remain a prime domestic target of the RN and its anti-Muslim agenda. It has not changed since 1972, when veterans of the Waffen-SS and Milice – the French paramilitary unit that collaborated with the Gestapo – helped create the FN.
Le Pen had already been found guilty of promoting war crimes, after setting up a record label specialising in Nazi marching songs. The always sly Le Pen managed to play down such antecedents, while using populist ideas about patriotism and laïcité – French secularism – to make out that he was defending a traditionally white France from dark-skinned invaders.
A political earthquake took place in 2002 when Le Pen came second to Jacques Chirac in the presidential election. Indeed, this showed how Le Pen’s skill at manipulating the media, and years of brazen showmanship, had made the so-called “Devil of the Republic” eminently electable.
In this sense, Le Pen was way ahead of his time. His ideas and strategies were increasingly mimicked by other far-right rabble rousers – not just in France, but also abroad.
Yes, Marine Le Pen thought the FN project needed toning down, and spoke of “detoxifying” it, but deep down she knew Le Pen’s bile had a huge constituency. Little wonder then that she rebranded the FN as the Rassemblement National, a title used by the Rassemblement National Populaire, the fascist party aligned with the Germans throughout the Occupation. Hence successive court judgments, in 2014 and 2015, ruled that it was perfectly permissible for Marine Le Pen to be referred to as a fascist.
I regularly speak to grassroots RN members who say Le Pen Senior was the true soul of the movement, and that his views were so impressive that they were being “stolen by other parties”. Hence rivals such as shock-jock-turned-politician Éric Zemmour challenging for the presidency and getting regular programmes on mainstream broadcast channels, while also picking up convictions for spreading racial and religious hate.
Marine Le Pen is currently waiting for the verdict in a European Parliament embezzlement trial that could see her imprisoned and – crucially – barred from standing for public office. If she can survive her legal problems in the criminal courts, then she has a strong chance of replacing Emmanuel Macron as president, when he is forced to stand down after serving the maximum two terms in office in 2027.
A RN head of state would in turn be a disaster for France – not just because of the party’s economic illiteracy, but because of its demonic nature. No matter what anybody thinks of its current incarnation, it is undoubtedly a party that was created by an out-and-out racist, and it remains full of supporters who are prepared to overlook crimes against humanity including the mass extermination of civilians.
Those who pretend otherwise need to examine their consciences, and those officiating at the Christian service should have made this clear.
Nabila Ramdani is a French-Algerian Journalist, Broadcaster and Academic & Author of Fixing France: How to Repair a Broken Republic (PublicAffairs/Hurst).
Follow her on Twitter: @NabilaRamdani
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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.
