Jean Marie Le Pen, the most influential French fascist leader since World War II, died on Tuesday January 7th. The same evening, crowds of mostly young people gathered in Paris, Lyon and Marseille to celebrate, to chants of “Bonne Année et Bonne Santé: Jean-Marie est décédé!” (Have a good year! Good health to you! Jean-Marie has passed away!) Extremist Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau immediately denounced the jubilation as “shameful”. Meanwhile, the press are publishing collections of Le Pen’s family photos, and President Macron officially expressed his condolences to the Le Pen family. Prime Minister François Bayrou paid homage to his being a “fighter”, while recognizing fundamental disagreements with him. And Jordan Bardella, chair of the fascist National Rally organization declared that Jean-Marie Le Pen “always served France, and defended her identity and sovereignty”.

On the radical Left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon of the France Insoumise wrote “The combat against this man is over. The fight goes on against the hate, racism, islamophobia and antisemitism which he spread”. The front page of the Communist daily paper L’Humanité published the headline “Hate Was His Trade” with a photograph of a German-made army knife engraved with Le Pen’s name. The knife was recovered from where he had left it, in a house where activist Ahmed Moulay was tortured and murdered during the Algerian War in 1957. Manon Aubry, a France Insoumise Euro MP, spoke yesterday of the death of a “notorious racist and antisemite”, while Philippe Poutou, leading member of the Nouveau Parti anticapitaliste, rejoiced at “this good news. The death of a racist, a colonialist, a fascist, a torturer, a murderer and a homophobe”.

A lifelong Nazi

Jean-Marie Le Pen turned to fascism young. At university in Paris in the late nineteen forties, he sold the newspaper of the far-right monarchists of Action Française. The publication was edited by Xavier Vallat, former “Commissioner in charge of Jewish Affairs” under the Nazi-controlled Vichy government. Le Pen was first elected as MP for the Poujadist far-right movement when he was 27, in the 1950s. In the early 1960s, when the war against Algeria was tearing France apart, he was in the army, fighting against Algerian independence. He was particularly involved in torturing prisoners, and always claimed that colonization was a positive thing. He never forgave Charles De Gaulle for having finally accepted Algerian independence.

In the 1960s, isolated politically, he nevertheless worked at maintaining the fascist tradition, setting up a company recording and releasing far right speeches and songs. One record, of songs and speeches of the Third Reich, explained on its cover: “These are the songs of the German Revolution […] Adolf Hitler’s rise to power and that of the National Socialist Party were characterized by a powerful movement of the masses, popular and democratic, which triumphed following regular electoral consultations, circumstances which are generally forgotten”.

In the 1970s, Jean-Marie Le Pen succeeded in piecing together the divided far-right remnants to found the Front national (FN), which decided to make a series of key tactical changes. Its Nazi core was to be hidden, and election campaigns, instead of street fighting, were to be the priority. Expressing antisemitism was shelved, while anti-Arab racism and islamophobia became almost the sole focus. Finally, traditional racism based on fake theories of biological hierarchy was left behind, the new discourse being based on “incompatible” cultures and the “war between civilizations”. As the FN formed, a deep economic crisis was returning to Western Europe, and with it increased pressure on the ruling class to turn popular anger against scapegoats.

Le Pen remained a nazi all his life. In 2010, at the age of 81, he declared in a seminar with student journalists: “In National Socialism, there is socialism. There was a considerable socialist content that transformed German society far more than any other political force had done.” And, just last September at 96 years of age, he was filmed in his home singing with an invited neo-nazi rock band called “Match Retour” (Rematch). The name refers to their hope of a second chance to impose nazism in Europe.

Tactical changes

Le Pen led the FN in France from 1972 to 2011. Talk shows could get record audiences by inviting him as a guest, and complacent interviews became common. Le Pen made the most of them. He declared that the existence of the gas ovens used to massacre Jews and others was “a detail of Second World War history”. Informed that a Jewish singer, Patrick Bruel, had joined others in protesting against the FN, he commented about there being “a whole ovenful” of his opponents soon.

The media loved these incidents, which they referred to as “slips” but which were really carefully thought-out interventions aimed at strengthening the hard-line fascist core of the FN. Once he had achieved a fairly large number of people who supported him on other questions, he would launch these antisemitic provocations. These were widely denounced, and the softer Le Pen supporters were then challenged to move further into nazi politics.

For many years, the FN built itself up slowly, helped by three important factors. First, the massive discredit of traditional left parties of government who were turning to neoliberalism and showing time after time that they had very little to offer ordinary people. Second, the very limited understanding on the radical left of the importance of stopping fascist parties by mass campaigns, including direct actions to prevent their activities. Third,, the historic weakness of the vast majority of the French Left concerning the fight against islamophobia, the form of racism which was gradually becoming the core of reaction in France.

The FN tried to keep its core of hardline nazis a secret. But in 1987, investigative journalist Anne Tristan infiltrated a branch of the FN, and noted how the hardliners talked: “Look, if you kill an Arab when Le Pen gets 0.5% of the vote, you get an outcry immediately, and you get called a racist” said one activist. “When Le Pen’s at 15%, people make less fuss. So we need to keep on, and, you’ll see, when we’re at 30%, people will stop yelling”.

Fascist breakthrough

On the 21st April 2002, Le Pen caused the biggest political earthquake of the last forty years in France by getting through to the second round run-off of the presidential elections. Tens of thousands protested all night in cities around France. Ten days later on May 1st, well over a million demonstrated against the fascists. Le Pen was easily defeated in the second round of the elections polling just under 18%. Five and a half million people voted for him. But this was a breakthrough which accelerated the rise in the fascists’ popularity and respectability. In 2017, ten and a half million voted for them, and in 2022, thirteen million.

Since Marine Le Pen, the daughter of Jean-Marie, became president of the FN in 2011, a determined and generally successful campaign of “image detoxification” has taken place. Nazi links were to be more comprehensively hidden, even organizing street demonstrations was to be avoided. She expelled her father from the organization (since he would not give up his sarcastic-toned antisemitism) as well as some other open nazis. She instructed MPs to concentrate on respectability, and was eventually to be seen at pro-Israel “marches against antisemitism” in 2023. Marine Le Pen’s femininity was also used to reassure voters that the old fascist values, generally associated with virility and masculinity, were no longer at the centre of the RN’s politics.

This week, Marine Le Pen’s worry is to organize a funeral for her father which does not give space for the open nazis who adored him. She hopes not to threaten the fragile respectability her party, renamed National Rally, has so successfully built up. She has chosen a family funeral after a Catholic mass in the Breton town he was born in. This will probably be followed, though, by a disgusting “homage” ceremony in Paris, which must be opposed.

Le Pen’s death is the time to re-explain and remobilize people against the fascist National Rally, which, preferred by Macron to the radical Left, is now closer to government than it ever was when led by Jean-Marie Le Pen.