Jean-Marie Le Pen: “His idea was that the nation was on the verge of death”, according to this researcher

Can we say that Jean-Marie Le Pen is the one who brought the far right back to the forefront?

It can be synthesized with this formula. It should be remembered that Jean-Marie Le Pen, who began campaigning in 1948, was excluded from the National Front in 2015: the length of his political life is incomparable. When he took over the presidency of the FN (in 1972), the far right represented less than 1% of the votes. It is fragmented into a stream of small groups. Le Pen manages to stabilize this formation which serves as a gathering point for the different chapels. And he socializes France into a political culture which is a marginal political culture. Gradually, from the 1980s, his work caused people to go his way and vote for him, even though it was a completely marginal political culture in France.

How did he achieve this, reaching the second round of the presidential election in 2002 where he obtained 17.8% of the votes (compared to 0.75% in 1974)?

In 1978, for the first time, the National Front went into electoral combat with the poster: one million unemployed is one million too many immigrants. Because until then, the FN’s offer was an anti-communist offer, an offer on which there were Jacques Chirac, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing who were more credible… So, it didn’t work. So the idea, which is not Jean-Marie Le Pen’s, is to position ourselves on a theme that has not yet been addressed. Then, the FN gradually gets rid of the most sulphurous people. Finally, the victory of François Mitterrand in 1981 radicalized a part of the right-wing voters and the FN achieved its first small successes in the 1980s, for example in the 1984 European elections (10.95%).

So there was already, at the time, a form of “normalization”…

This was already the principle behind the creation of the FN in 1972: it was created by young people who claim to be neofascists, all of whom have criminal records, and some veterans of the collaboration. When they go for Jean-Marie Le Pen, it is already part of a normalization strategy!

Decades later, it was Marine Le Pen who had to break up with him to “normalize…”

We must stand out from the rest of the political market, reject it, say, “this is the system,” and, at the same time, normalize ourselves. Moreover, after having achieved a very good score (14.39%) in the 1988 presidential election, Jean-Marie Le Pen said: “I will never know if it is despite, or thanks to, the “point of detail”. »

Who are the heirs of Jean-Marie Le Pen today?

Le Pen was a national populist. His idea was that the nation was on the verge of death, in decadence, unless regenerated by a savior who emerges from the people, who saves the nation by ruling over the elites through referendums. Marine Le Pen has changed things, but she is also, like Jordan Bardella, a national populist. We are in the same ideological line. But Le Pen’s heirs are very numerous: they are in the smallest municipal council where there is an elected RN, in the smallest editorial office of the Bolloré group… The host of CNews or the local elected RN can tell what they want: if it hadn’t been for Le Pen for decades, they wouldn’t be here.

You encountered him during your research. What memories do you have of him?

He couldn’t stand being resisted, but he couldn’t stand being resisted either! The interviews with him were necessarily special, you had to disagree and manage the disagreement. I also remember one day when he said to me: “We who are intellectuals”. The taste he had for classical culture meant that he liked meeting left-wing intellectuals, which is what I am, roughly, if I caricature from the opposite point of view! So he was also happy to talk about French history or French literature.

* Nicolas Lebourg is the author of “Paris-Moscow, a century of the extreme right”, with Olivier Schmitt (Seuil).