Last weekend in Paris, Jean-Marie Le Pen insulted some celebrities who had criticized the National Front’s success in the recent elections to the European parliament. When he came to the French Jewish actor and pop singer Patrick Bruel, Le Pen said “We will organize an oven for him next time.”
Le Pen used the word fournée, attempting to make a word-play on tournée, which means concert tour. Fournée can mean “baker’s oven” or “batch” – but oven is the only word that made sense in the context. The party’s vice-president, Louis Aliot, described Le Pen’s use of the word as “politically stupid and disturbing.”
Aline Le Bail-Kremer, a spokeswoman for SOS Racisme, an anti-racism group, said her group would file a criminal complaint against Le Pen.
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 percent 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 n 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. At age 28, he was the youngest member of the Assembly. Le Pen was a deputy until 1962, and again (for the NF) from 1986 to 1988.
He also served as an army intelligence officer during the Algerian War.
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 percent 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 percent 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 20thcenturies.
The former championed secularism, universalism and anti-clericalism, and upheld the rights of Jews. Its advocates prevailed in the famous Alfred Dreyfus case at the turn of the 20th century, when a Jewish army officer who had been falsely imprisoned as a German spy by antisemitic 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 World War II 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. Already 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.
Maurras’ reactionary Action Française movement denounced the Third Republic as “the Jew State, the Masonic State, the immigrant State.”
The Vichyites, defeated in World War II, lost ideological and political power, their ideas 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. He asked, “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 World War II.” Three years later a German court fined him for a similar comment judged to have minimized 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.
Le Pen’s kind of prejudice has been making strange alliances in recent years with the new kind of left-leaning antsemitism, represented by people like the black comedian Dieudonné M’bala M’bala. The two men have become friends.
Marine Le Pen has modified the party’s positions while remaining opposed to the European Union. She also favors 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 antisemitism in the strongest terms.” She has rebuked her father for his recent remarks. Indeed, she even hopes the NF gains some Jewish support, since the main danger to the French Jewish community now comes from Islamist radicals.
Henry Srebrnik is a professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island.
