In February 1984, Jean-Marie Le Pen appeared for the first time on France’s biggest political TV show, L’Heure de Vérité (The Hour of Truth). Outside the studio, despite the freezing temperature, the atmosphere was heated, with demonstrators protesting the “indecent” invitation of the leader of the far-right National Front party—whom many French considered a racist and a fascist.
Inside, several stern-looking journalists grilled Le Pen for over an hour. Did he not fear his rhetoric against immigrants could stoke the worst instincts in the French people? What did he have to say about the avowed antisemites and former SS members who filled his party’s ranks? What about his support for the dictatorships of Francisco Franco and Augusto Pinochet?
Le Pen didn’t sugarcoat how he felt about immigration, but that night, the interviewers’ efforts to expose his darkest views fell flat. He refused to be blamed for what other people had said or done, assured viewers that he was a big fan of democracy, and came across as a reasonable, jovial guy who simply said out loud what millions of working-class French like him thought too and who dared to challenge the political correctness of the media elite. The following day, outside the National Front party’s offices, hundreds of people were waiting in line, asking to join. A populist star was born.
The then-55-year-old, born in June 1928, had come a long way from the house with dirt floors in the tiny Brittany village where he had spent his childhood. After his fisherman father was blown out of the sea by a mine during World War II, Le Pen, then age 14, experienced firsthand what real poverty was. School wasn’t his forte, yet somehow he managed to move to Paris and graduate from high school there while scraping together a living through various menial jobs.
It was at university, at the helm of the right-wing law students’ union in the late 1940s and early 1950s, that Le Pen blossomed as a leader—brawling with leftists, chasing girls, and enjoying the debauchery of student life in the City of Light. Money was still tight, but Le Pen was having a blast.
He kept busy after university too. In the 1950s, he did a stint in Parliament with the anti-tax Poujadist movement and volunteered to fight against pro-independence movements in Indochina and Algeria, an obvious decision for a hothead convinced that France had to hold on to its empire by all possible means. Those means included torturing prisoners, which the French Army systematically did as part of its counterinsurgency campaign in Algeria and which Le Pen was accused of himself. He always denied any direct involvement, but controversially, he also defended the legitimacy of “rough questioning” in a situation where intelligence was desperately needed, and fast. “We didn’t crush the terrorists by being nice with them,” he would say decades later.
By the mid-1960s, however, the empire was gone and the nationalist political culture in France had become more marginal than ever. The National Front, which Le Pen founded in 1972 alongside various neofascist leaders, would obtain barely 0.75 percent of the vote in the presidential election held two years later, and the party would remain completely irrelevant in the country’s political landscape for a decade.
But Le Pen was tenacious, and in the early 1980s, amid the neoliberal turn that was taking place in much of the West and the dissatisfaction of many French people with the government of Socialist President François Mitterrand, the National Front started attracting ever larger shares of the working class and the petite bourgeoisie.
It did so by obsessively lashing out at immigrants, associating them with crime and accusing them of taking people’s jobs away. It was reckless rhetoric, but it resonated with many. Poor banlieues heavily populated by immigrants were visible to all, yet much of the left had grown reluctant to talk about the problems related to immigration. Le Pen sensed an opportunity there and made the issue his own. “1 million unemployed means 1 million immigrants too many! France and the French first!” read the National Front’s electoral posters.
After doing well in a handful of local elections in 1983, the party won over 10 percent of the national vote in European elections one year later and managed to get dozens of deputies into the French Parliament in 1986—the first time a far-right party had entered the National Assembly since the Poujadist movement of the 1950s.
For a moment, around the time of his charm offensive on The Hour of Truth, Le Pen seemed on his way to becoming a protagonist of French political life. Sure, on the right as much as on the left, many saw him as a hateful bigot—among other things, he believed that homosexuality was a “biological and social anomaly” and that people with AIDS were like “lepers” and should be locked up. But if Le Pen’s surge in the polls continued, sometime down the road an electoral alliance with the mainstream conservatives and a ministerial job were not too far-fetched to contemplate. Le Pen certainly did.
It didn’t last long, though. In a 1987 interview on French radio, Le Pen bungled his answer to a question on Holocaust denial, calling into doubt the reality of Nazi gas chambers and adding that, in any case, whether they had existed or not was a “detail” in the history of World War II.
The mask was off. The French caught a glimpse of who Le Pen really was, and they didn’t like what they saw. The share of people who considered Le Pen a “danger for democracy” went from 35 percent to 65 percent. Le Pen and his National Front became political pariahs.
“In 40 years of public life, that was the most stupid thing to ever come out of my mouth,” Le Pen told an aide after the radio show. However, it didn’t take him long to fully embrace the bad-boy role that the political class had resolved to relegate him to. Over the following decades, every now and then Le Pen would drop an antisemitic, racist, or homophobic comment in front of the cameras; then he’d watch the outcry ensue with a satisfied grin.
It must have been almost liberating for him, letting his darkest self finally emerge unrestrained and abandoning once and for all his never-fully-acknowledged hopes of going more mainstream, as if they had been just moments of weakness.
His mission now was to keep the hard-liners inside his party happy. His provocations became a way to undermine the people—including, starting in the 2000s, his daughter Marine Le Pen—who wanted to soften the party’s image to end its isolation and to appeal to more moderate voters. “No one’s interested in a nice National Front,” argued Le Pen.
Whether he truly cared about garnering mainstream political power at that point is unclear. To be sure, he ruled the National Front like an absolute monarch, angrily confronting (and usually kicking out) those who dared question his decisions, and he stubbornly continued to run for the French presidency over and over again.
But even as he got older, he made little effort to look like government material. It wasn’t just the outrageous statements. In 1997, while campaigning in support of another daughter, Marie-Caroline Le Pen, who was running for Parliament, the 68-year-old Le Pen got into a fight with a group of protesters, manhandling a left-wing female candidate and shouting a homophobic insult in front of the cameras. Marie-Caroline’s hopes were instantly dashed, but Le Pen was radiant. “I feel young again,” he beamed.
In 2002, he finally got through to the second round of the presidential election, in an upset that traumatized much of the country. Yet Jacques Chirac’s landslide victory in the runoff, with over 80 percent of the vote, made clear that the Élysée Palace would never be within the grasp of the National Front under Le Pen.
That was the beginning of the end of Le Pen’s political career. Marine’s star started to rise. She took over the National Front from her 82-year-old father in 2011, immediately doubling down on her efforts to de-demonize the party and making significant changes to its political platform. Today’s National Rally, as it has been rebranded, remains a hard-right party hell-bent on limiting immigration and whose rank and file have a penchant for making Islamophobic and xenophobic remarks. But its statist, big-spending proposals for the economy have little in common with its founder’s disgust for red tape, taxes, and state interventionism.
Jean-Marie Le Pen didn’t sit quietly through this transformation, though—instead, he criticized and sabotaged his daughter for years. Long-simmering tensions ultimately came to a head in 2015, when, in a stunning turn of events, the old founder was expelled from the party.
It is somewhat ironic that Marine Le Pen had to push her father aside for the party he created to finally thrive. Today, after a purge of the more explicitly neofascist, antisemitic tones that long characterized the party, the National Rally polls at about a quarter of the electorate, the largest single party in France. Marine has qualified for a presidential runoff twice, in both cases losing to current French President Emmanuel Macron but obtaining over 40 percent of the vote in 2022. Many believe that her election as president is just a question of time, and they often wonder anxiously to what extent, deep inside, she’s really different from her father.
And it’s not just France. Modern versions of the far-right populism that Jean-Marie Le Pen embodied are thriving across the West. Italy is led by a postfascist prime minister. Nationalist-populist parties are in charge in Hungary and Poland, and they share power in Finland and Sweden. In the United States, Donald Trump, whose “America First” slogan is reminiscent of the old National Front posters, had already won the top job once and won it again in 2024.
Jean-Marie Le Pen is dead, but his heirs are doing just fine.
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