Jean-Marie Le Pen gives speech during a meeting at the Maison de la Mutualité, in Paris.
Within the past few days, Jean-Marie Le Pen, former leader of the Front National, now the Rassemblement National, in France, died at age 96. Le Pen was leader of the Front National beginning in 1972, when he helped create it, together with François Brigneau, a wartime collaborator with Nazi Germany. Le Pen led his political party until he retired in 2011.
By the 1970s, immigration into France had become a major political issue in France and Le Pen was already criticizing it. I recall summers I spent there during the mid-1970s, when I was doing research for what became Collaborationism in France during the Second World War, a book on the French who collaborated from ideological sympathy with Nazi Germany during World War II.
At the time, I was living in a hotel-pension in Paris, where some eight to ten residents would have dinners together in a common dining room. Most of the residents were French students or employees who lived too far away for a daily commute to Paris. One of them, Eddy, would shout repeatedly over the dinner table that whatever problems France was facing at the time were the result of an influx of immigrants, specifically Muslims from North Africa. Another of the residents invariably countered by arguing that without immigrant labor, the French economy would not be nearly as robust as it was and that all would suffer in France. “It doesn’t matter,” Eddy would retort, invariably in a loud voice, it would be better to be poorer and without “the immigrants.” It was this anti-immigrant sentiment, expressed by Eddy, that Le Pen articulated.
The images presented today in the news media of Le Pen as a powerful speaker are fully accurate. During the 1990s, I was invited by an acquaintance in Paris to hear him speak. He filled up an auditorium in one of the suburbs east of Paris and was, indeed, a powerful and passionate orator, speaking to a crowd of largely sympathizers. In 2011, he retired as head of the Front National. He was succeeded by his daughter Marine, who, as part of a policy of making the party appear less extreme, expelled her father four years later. Her attempts to make the party more mainstream include the condemnation of antisemitism, in contrast to her father who had described the Holocaust as a “detail” in history.
Bertram Gordon is professor emeritus of history at Mills College, as well as an OLLI member, faculty member and volunteer. His most recent book War Tourism: Second World War France from Defeat and Occupation to the Creation of Heritage grew from his discovery of German-language tourism magazines published for German soldiers during their Second World War occupation of France. He can be reached at bmgordon@berkeley.edu.
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