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Jean Marie Le Pen, the most influential French fascist leader since World War II, died on January 7.

The same evening, crowds of mostly young people gathered in Paris, Lyon and Marseille to celebrate, to chants of “Bonne Année et Bonne Santé: Jean-Marie est décédé!” (“Have a good year! Good health to you! Jean-Marie has passed away!”).

Extremist Interior Minister, Bruno Retailleau, immediately denounced the jubilation as “shameful”. Meanwhile, the press are publishing collections of Le Pen’s family photos, and President Emmanuel Macron officially expressed his condolences to the Le Pen family.

Prime Minister François Bayrou paid homage to his being a “fighter”, while recognising fundamental disagreements with him. Jordan Bardella, chair of the fascist National Rally organisation, declared that Le Pen “always served France, and defended her identity and sovereignty”.

On the radical left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon of the France Insoumise wrote: “The combat against this man is over. The fight goes on against the hate, racism, islamophobia and antisemitism which he spread”. The Communist daily paper ��’H�ܳ����Ծ���é had “Hate Was His Trade” on its January 8 front page banner headline, with a photograph of a German-made army knife engraved with Le Pen’s name. The knife was recovered from a house — where Le Pen had left it — where activist Ahmed Moulay was tortured and murdered during the Algerian War, in 1957.

Manon Aubry, a France Insoumise member of the European Parliament, spoke on January 6 of the death of a “notorious racist and antisemite”, while Philippe Poutou, leading member of the New Anticapitalist Party, rejoiced at “this good news. The death of a racist, a colonialist, a fascist, a torturer, a murderer and a homophobe”.

A lifelong Nazi

Jean-Marie Le Pen turned to fascism young. At university in Paris in the late 1940s, he sold the newspaper of the far-right monarchists, Action Française. The publication was edited by Xavier Vallat, who had been “Commissioner in charge of Jewish Affairs” under the Vichy government.

Le Pen was first elected MP for right-wing populist Pierre Poujade’s movement when he was 27, in the 1950s. In the early 1960s, when the war against Algeria was tearing France apart, he was in the army, fighting against Algerian independence and involved in torturing prisoners. Le Pen always claimed that colonisation was a positive thing and never forgave president Charles De Gaulle for finally accepting Algerian independence.

In the 1960s, isolated politically, he nevertheless worked at maintaining the fascist tradition, setting up a company recording and releasing far-right speeches and songs. One record, of songs and speeches of the Third Reich, explained on its cover: “These are the songs of the German Revolution … Adolf Hitler's rise to power and that of the National Socialist Party were characterised by a powerful movement of the masses, popular and democratic, which triumphed following regular electoral consultations — circumstances which are generally forgotten.”

In the 1970s, Le Pen succeeded in piecing together the divided far-right remnants to found the National Front (FN), which decided to make a series of key tactical changes. Its Nazi core was to be hidden, and election campaigns, not street-fighting, were to be the priority. Expressing antisemitism was shelved, and anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia became almost the only focus. Finally, traditional racism based on fake theories of biological hierarchy was left behind, the new discourse being based on “incompatible” cultures and the “war between civilisations”. The FN was formed at a time when deep economic crisis was returning to Western Europe, and with it increasing pressure on the ruling class to turn popular anger against scapegoats.

Le Pen would remain a Nazi all his life. In 2010, at the age of 81, he declared in a seminar with student journalists: “In National Socialism, there is socialism. There was a considerable socialist content that transformed German society far more than any other political force had done.” Just last September, at 96 years of age, he was filmed singing, in his home, with an invited neo-Nazi rock band, “Match Retour” (Return Match), whose name refers to their hope of a second chance to impose Nazism in Europe.

Tactical changes

Le Pen led the FN from 1972‒2011. Talk shows could get record audiences by inviting him on as a guest, and complacent interviews became common. Le Pen made the most of them. He declared notably that the existence of the gas ovens used to massacre Jews and others was “a detail of Second World War history”. Informed that one Jewish singer, Patrick Bruel, had joined others in protesting against the FN, he commented about there being “a whole oven full” of his opponents soon.

The media loved these incidents, which they referred to as “slips” but which were really carefully thought-out interventions aimed at strengthening the hard-line fascist core of the FN. Once he had a fairly large number of people who supported him on other questions, he would launch these antisemitic provocations. These were widely denounced, and the softer Le Pen supporters were challenged to move further into Nazi politics.

For many years, the FN built itself up slowly, helped by three important factors: first, the massive discredit of traditional left parties of government who were turning to neoliberalism and showing time after time that they had extremely little to offer ordinary people; secondly the very limited understanding on the radical left of the importance of stopping fascist parties by mass campaigns, including direct action to prevent their activities; and thirdly, the historic weakness of the vast majority of the left concerning the fight against Islamophobia, the form of racism which was gradually becoming the centre of reaction in France.

The FN tried hard to keep its core of hardline Nazis a secret. But in 1987, investigative journalist Anne Tristan infiltrated a branch of the FN, and noted how the hardliners talked: “Look, if you kill an Arab when Le Pen gets 0.5% of the vote, you get an outcry immediately, and you get called a racist” said one activist, “When Le Pen’s at 15%, people make less fuss. So we need to keep on, and, you’ll see, when we’re at 30%, people will stop yelling”.

Fascist breakthrough

Le Pen caused the biggest political earthquake of the past 40 years on April 21, 2002, by getting through to the second round run-off of the presidential elections. Tens of thousands protested all night in cities around the country. Ten days later, on May 1, more than a million demonstrated against the fascists.

Le Pen was easily defeated in the second round, polling just under 18%. Five and a half million voted for him. But this was a breakthrough, which accelerated the rise in the fascists’ popularity and respectability. In 2017, 10.5 million voted for them, and in 2022, 13 million.

When his daughter Marine Le Pen became president of the FN in 2011, a determined and generally successful campaign of “image detoxification” took place.

Nazi links were more comprehensively hidden, even organising street demonstrations was avoided. Marine expelled her father from the organisation in 2015 (since he would not give up his sarcastic antisemitism), threw out some other open Nazis, instructed MPs to concentrate on respectability, and was eventually seen on pro-Israel “marches against antisemitism”, in 2023. Marine Le Pen’s femininity was also used to reassure voters that the old fascist values, generally associated with virility, were no longer at the centre of the party’s politics.

This week, Marine Le Pen’s worry is how to organise a funeral for her father that does not give space for the open Nazis who adored him to show themselves in public. This is so as not to threaten the fragile respectability that her party, renamed National Rally (RN), has so successfully built up. She has chosen a family funeral after a Catholic mass in the Breton town he was born in. This will probably be followed, though, by a disgusting “homage” ceremony in Paris, which must be opposed.

Le Pen’s death is the time to re-explain and remobilise people against the fascist RN, which, preferred by Macron to the radical Left, is closer to government than it ever was when led by Jean-Marie Le Pen.

[John Mullen is an anticapitalist activist and a member of a France Insoumise Action Group in the Paris region. His website is randombolshevik.org.]