Jean-Marie Le Pen
Jean-Marie Le Pen is a prominent French political figure known for founding the National Front (Front National, FN), a party established in 1972 that became widely recognized for its strong anti-immigrant stance. Born in 1928 in Brittany, Le Pen's early life was marked by hardship, including the loss of his father during World War II. His political career began in earnest in the 1970s, gaining traction during periods of economic hardship in France, where his rhetoric often linked unemployment to immigration. Le Pen's candidacy in the 2002 presidential election was particularly notable, as he received nearly 17% of the vote, which led to widespread protests against his views, especially his controversial remarks regarding the Holocaust.
Throughout his political journey, Le Pen has been credited with normalizing anti-Muslim sentiment in France, which some argue contributed to societal polarization. His party achieved significant electoral success in the 1980s and 1990s, influencing national discourse around immigration and cultural identity. Despite stepping down from the leadership of the FN in 2011, he remained a controversial figure, facing legal challenges and health issues in his later years. In 2017, the FN rebranded as the National Rally (Rassemblement National, RN), continuing to shape the political landscape in France. Le Pen's legacy is complex, characterized by both his supporters’ admiration and significant criticism regarding his role in fostering xenophobia.
Jean-Marie Le Pen
Nationalist
- Born: June 20, 1928
- Place of Birth: La Trinité-sur-Mer, France
FRENCH POLITICIAN AND LEADER OF FRANCE’S ANTI-IMMIGRANT FRONT NATIONAL PARTY
CAUSE OF NOTORIETY: Although beloved by his supporters, Le Pen is widely credited with legitimizing anti-Muslim discrimination in France during the late twentieth century.
ACTIVE: Beginning 1956
Early Life
Jean-Marie Le Pen was born to a fisherman father and farm-family mother in 1928 in Brittany, a Celtic region of northwestern France known for its individualism. Le Pen was argumentative and combative as child, both in school and in the streets, especially after being orphaned in 1942 when his father’s fishing boat struck a mine (World War II was at its height), killing the elder Le Pen. Le Pen’s teenage years were spent under his maternal grandfather’s guidance until he finished high school and departed for Paris to study law.
Le Pen continued his combative ways in law school, rising to prominence in the politics of a right-wing student association and engaging in street fights with leftists. By the early 1950s, he had attracted the attention of prominent right-wing French politicians, albeit those discredited by their prior association with the regime that collaborated with the Germans in occupied France during World War II. However, shortly after the right-wing campaigns in France’s 1951 parliamentary elections fell flat, Le Pen tired of the study of law and, momentarily, French politics. In 1954, he joined the French Foreign Legion.
Political Career
Technically, Le Pen’s political career began in 1956, when he was elected to the French Assembly as the representative of a small shopkeepers’ party and briefly served there between and following tours of duty in Indochina, the Suez Canal, and Algeria. However, when one considers his impact on national politics, his career really began in 1972, when he and other members of the postwar, right-wing Ordre Nouveau (New Order) founded the Front National (FN) Party. Though the FN was anchored on the right by a broadly nationalist agenda, from the beginning it was defined in terms of its anti-immigrant stance. By 1972, immigrants from North Africa—whom France had recruited in the 1950s to help the country rebuild after the war—had grown quickly in numbers. Immigrant presence in those areas containing large numbers of French settlers (who had been forced out of Algeria when it gained independence one decade earlier) proved to be a contentious issue. To Le Pen and his compatriots, the growth of this non-French, Muslim community constituted a direct challenge to France’s culture and the secular nature of the state.
The FN did not achieve instant success, as reflected in Le Pen’s showing in France’s 1974 presidential election, when he received only 0.74 percent of the first-round vote. By the 1980s, however, unemployment was soaring in France, and Le Pen slogans, such as "Two Million French Unemployed Are Two Million Foreign Workers Too Many," resonated with the French. By the 1990s, his party was regularly attracting one vote in seven in France’s multiparty system, and Le Pen had secured seats in the European Parliament (in 1984 and again in 1999) and was twice elected to the governing council of the Provence region of southeastern France.
The capstone of Le Pen’s career was his showing in the 2002 French presidential election. With nearly 17 percent of the vote, he qualified for the two-man runoff election against the incumbent French president Jacques Chirac. Given his long record of intemperate outbursts against France’s foreign communities regarding such topics as the Holocaust (he labeled it a footnote to history), his first-round success produced considerable international notoriety. On the eve of the runoff election, French demonstrators by the thousands engaged in protests unprecedented in France’s history and denounced Le Pen’s candidacy. Furthermore, Le Pen’s party was repudiated for its extreme proposals (such as revoking the naturalized citizenship of Muslims whenever possible) even by other anti-immigrant parties throughout Europe. When the votes were counted, Chirac had won more than 80 percent of them, enough to reelect him to the presidency.
The 2007 election proved to be a disappointment to the FN, with Le Pen only garnering little more than 10 percent of the vote and thus not qualifying for the runoff. In 2011, Le Pen announced his retirement from the party presidency. He was succeeded by his daughter, Marine Le Pen, a political force with her own presidential aspirations. A few years later, Le Pen suggested that the Ebola epidemic in West Africa represented a solution to Europe's immigration woes and reprised his infamous Holocaust remark. The latter led to his suspension from the FN in the spring of 2015, a move overturned in court, and his eventual expulsion that August by his daughter Marine. Le Pen warned the FN that he might launch another rival party ahead of the 2017 presidential race. He later also weighed in on the 2016 campaign for the US presidency, endorsing Donald Trump for Republican candidate. His party changed its name to the National Rally (RN) in 2017. Le Pen did not endorse his daughter Marine when she ran unsuccessfully for president in 2022. Instead, he backed her rival, Eric Zemmour.
In the early 2020s, he experienced several health concerns, including a mild heart attack. He had heart surgery in 2023. Le Pen was placed under legal guardianship of his daughters in April 2024. In July, the Paris judicial court ruled he was unfit to stand trial with Marine Le Pen on charges of misuse of European Union (EU) funds. About two dozen party officials were charged with financing the RN with millions of European Parliament euros.
Impact
In late 2005, pent-up frustrations within France’s Muslim community exploded in rioting, acts of arson, and clashes with the French police, events that lasted nearly a month and encompassed most French cities. Neither Jean-Marie Le Pen nor his party was directly responsible for these riots. However, many feel that Le Pen and the FN indirectly helped build the polarized France composed of two parallel, nonintegrated societies out of which the riots grew: that of Muslim and immigrant communities and that of ethnic French citizens.
By electorally exploiting the foreigner issue, blaming French unemployment on France’s immigrant communities, and ceaselessly defining the Muslim culture as a threat to the French way of life, Le Pen gave xenophobia (antiforeigner sentiment) a level of respectability in France. In turn, these attitudes condoned the discrimination encountered by France’s Muslims both in society at large and in the job market. Moreover, through its success, the FN forced France’s principal parties to adopt its rhetoric (French presidents have thus been known to speak of “smelly foreigners”) and enact policies aimed at appeasing xenophobia in France at the expense of preparing the French for becoming a multicultural society or effectively protecting the civil and social rights of the immigrant communities.
Bibliography
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