Le Pen, the National Front, and France

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer 

Who is Jean-Marie Le Pen? This is no idle question, as he is the founder of a French political party that has been making significant gains in recent years and, as such, he remains an important figure in his country.

Capitalizing on anti-Muslim sentiment and anger about the state of the French economy, the party he created, the National Front (NF), came first in French balloting for the European parliament elections held this past May, with a full 25 per cent of the vote.

Born in 1928, Le Pen led the NF from its foundation in 1972 until 2011. His longevity in politics and his five attempts to become president of France have made him a fixture on the political right.

Le Pen’s political career began in Paris in 1956, when he was elected to the National Assembly as a member of Pierre Poujade’s populist party, the Union de Defense Commercants et Artisans. Le Pen was a deputy until 1962, and again (for the NF) from 1986 to 1988.

In 1984, Le Pen won a seat in the European Parliament and has been continuously re-elected since then, though in 2000 he was banned from public office and stripped of his seat for one year, following a 1998 conviction for assaulting a Socialist politician the year before.

In the 2002 presidential election, he obtained 16.86 per cent of the votes in the first round, good for second place, before losing badly to incumbent Jacques Chirac in the run-off. He finished fourth in the 2007 election. His daughter Marine Le Pen, who has headed the party since 2011, finished third in the 2012 presidential election, with 17.9 per cent of the vote.

Ever since the French Revolution, France has been divided by two ideological strands: the first is the Jacobin republicanism of liberty, equality, fraternity, the second the organic Catholic nationalism and monarchism that morphed into fascism and racism in the late 19th and 20th centuries.

The former championed secularism, universalism and anti-clericalism. Its advocates prevailed in the famous Dreyfus case at the turn of the 20th century, when a Jewish army officer who had been falsely imprisoned as a German spy by anti-Semitic elements in the general staff was exonerated. The issue divided France from the affair’s inception in 1894 until its resolution in 1906.

The right-wing tradition culminated in the Nazi collaborationist Vichy government in the Second World War under Marshal Philippe Pétain, when some 90,000 Jews were sent to their deaths.

The decades preceding the 1940 defeat of republicanism saw the rise of fascist movements and ideologues.In January1934, fascist groups in Paris rioted trying to overthrow the Third Republic.

Writers such as Edouard Drumont, Maurice Barrès, Drieu La Rochelle, and Charles Maurras presented a resurgent clericalism and a heightened xenophobia as the solution to France’s malaise, in opposition to the Enlightenment rationality of the left.

The Vichyites, defeated in the Second World War, lost their ideological and political power, and their ideas became anathema to most. Upon his conviction in 1945 for “complicity with the enemy” during the German occupation, Maurras exclaimed: “It’s Dreyfus’s revenge!”

But has the National Front emerged out of this tarnished tradition? Le Pen himself certainly has. Already in the 1960s, he called for the rehabilitation of collaborationists, asking “Was General de Gaulle more brave than Marshal Pétain? It was much easier to resist in London than to resist in France.”

Le Pen was fined by a French court in 1996 for saying that the gas chambers used to kill Jews in the Holocaust were “merely a detail in the history of the Second World War.” Three years later a German court fined him for a similar comment judged to have minimised the Holocaust.

In 2004 France’s highest court convicted him of inciting racial hatred for telling a newspaper in 2003 that Muslims would one day run France and strike fear into the hearts of the non-Muslim population.

Marine Le Pen has modified the party’s positions while remaining opposed to the European Union. She also favours a “radical change of politics” in order to drastically reduce the influx of illegal immigrants towards France, as well as a moratorium on legal immigration.

The NF leader maintains that the party resolutely “condemns any form of anti-Semitism in the strongest terms.” She has rebuked her father for recent remarks many construed as anti-Semitic. Indeed, she even hopes the NF gains some Jewish support, since the main danger to the French Jewish community now comes from Islamist radicals.