Ding Dong, Jean-Marie Le Pen Is Dead

Let's not forget the origins of the National Rally co-founder and the ways in which his ideas are reflected in modern-day French politics.

Jean-Marie Le Pen captured on photo by my friend, photographer Pascal Montagne.

It was not a good day for National Rally leader Marine Le Pen. The morning started with a barge she was riding on crashing in Mayotte and finished with her 96-year-old father dying in the hospital.

But let’s not feel too bad for Marine.

Jean-Marie Le Pen was a bad man. He was a racist who once said that he wanted ebola to “finish the job” of slowing African birth rates. He was an antisemite who called the gas chambers at Nazi concentration camps a “detail of history.” And he was a torturer, who during his several month stint in Algeria was known for “emtombing” innocent Algerians by burying them alive in underground pits.

Several weeks ago, I wrote for New Lines Magazine about that elusive, and crucial, puzzle piece in Jean-Marie Le Pen’s history: Algeria. You can read the piece in full here, but in a nutshell that story looked at how Le Pen’s three-month stint as a paratrooper during the vicious Battle of Algiers (which would later come to be known as the Great Repression of Algiers) in early 1957 created the man who would go on to lead the National Front.

I spoke with the historian Fabrice Riceputi, who recently published a book on the topic entitled “Le Pen and Torture: History Versus Forgetting,” as well as scholars of modern fascist movements and an Algerian activist in Montreuil, where I live.

What struck me in those conversations was that according to the scholars I spoke with, the Algerian months — in and of themselves — weren’t what radicalized Le Pen. (He had also fought in Indochina before becoming the second youngest member of the French National Assemble in the 1950s.) What radicalized Le Pen was the colonial loss of Algeria, a few years later. For people like Le Pen, the loss of France’s last remaining overseas colony felt like a physical amputation (and ironically was unrelated to Le Pen’s loss of an eye years later). They wanted revenge. From there, the narrative quickly shifted from the “civilizing mission” to preventing the “Algerian invasion.” Lepenism, if nothing else, was about putting Arabs back in their place: just like French colonialism was. The model would scale, eventually becoming today’s “immigrant invasion.”

Jean-Marie Le Pen was the figurehead of this movement, but he was not necessarily the brains behind it. Le Pen was an opportunist, scholars of the French far-right told me. A brawler, a loud talker, sure, but a crafter of ideology? Not so much. The people he surrounded himself with, however, were ideologues: they were radical and violent monarchists, neo-Nazis and Secret Army Organization terrorists who wanted to impose their vision of a “pure” France on an increasingly diverse population.

This, indeed, is what scares me most about modern-day populists aping Le Pen. As 2025 begins, I’m not so much worried about the Trumps of the world, I’m worried about the Stephen Millers. Jean-Marie Le Pen, like Trump, drew in the public attention with his crass lines, his wild gestures, his shock value while his cronies crafted the policies. It was his right-hand man Francois Duprat, for example, who crafted the slogan “1 million unemployed is 1 million immigrants too many!” which in the 1970s helped catapult the National Front into a household name.

Jean-Marie Le Pen was a bully. He bullied his way to the top of French politics by punching down. At immigrants. At Jews. At LGBT people. But he was aided and abetted by a cabal of nerds, and as we’ve learned again and again, after high school, the nerds are almost always more dangerous than the bullies.

Bully or ideologue, Le Pen’s movement is winning over many French people. Le Pen’s National Front Party, since renamed the National Rally, secured 41.5% of votes in the second round of the 2022 presidential elections. The party controls 124 seats in France’s parliament: not the highest proportion, but third and rising quickly.

As I wrote in my review of Les Electeurs Ordinaires, voters who support the National Rally often say they are not casting a racist vote, but very quickly traffic racist tropes that Le Pen popularized.

'“They’re in the administrations, in the police, the army, everywhere, everywhere,” one National Rally supporter said of immigrants, who in many case take on the most ungrateful and worst paid jobs. “They are everywhere.” […] They’re imposing themselves, little by little.”

Jean-Marie Le Pen is alive and well.