For years, France’s main far-right party tried to distance itself from the long trail of inflammatory and derogatory comments made by Jean-Marie Le Pen, its founding president.
His daughter, who took the party reins in 2011, kicked him out. It changed its name, from National Front to National Rally. And the party — long run by Mr. Le Pen, who called Hitler’s gas chambers “a detail” of history — has made a point of decrying antisemitism.
But when Mr. Le Pen died on Tuesday at 96, the party nuzzled him deeply in its fold, its leaders celebrating him as a visionary, an “immense patriot” and a “courageous and talented politician.”
“He will remain the one who, in the storms, held in his hands the small flickering flame of the French Nation,” the National Rally said in a statement, adding that his “will and unwavering tenacity” had shaped the party into an “autonomous, powerful and free” force.
There was nothing in the statement to indicate disagreement with Mr. Le Pen’s views or his caustic remarks. At most, it said he had been “unruly and sometimes turbulent,” often fond of controversy.
Jean-Yves Camus, an expert on the far right at the Jean-Jaurès Foundation, said that the strategy of Marine Le Pen, Mr. Le Pen’s daughter and successor, “was always to set herself apart without taking full stock” of her father’s unsavory legacy. It was too early to tell whether she might yet do so now, he said.
“A venerable age had taken the warrior but given us back our father” Ms. Le Pen, who is no longer party president but still a top lawmaker and leading force in the party, said in a short tribute on Wednesday. “Death has taken him back.”
So far, the party does not appear to be headed down a path of deep introspection. Instead, Mr. Camus said, it seems to be trying to “re-inject” a new version of Mr. Le Pen into France’s collective memory, safe in the knowledge that there will be no more racist or antisemitic outbursts from him.
But Renaud Labaye, the National Rally’s general secretary in the lower house of Parliament, said the party had already weighed in on Mr. Le Pen’s past.
“It was precisely his expulsion — an act made all the stronger by the fact that it was initiated by his daughter and that he was the party’s founder — that underlined the fact that his excesses and reprehensible positions were firmly condemned by the party,” Mr. Labaye said.
For decades, Mr. Le Pen was a pariah of French politics, considered so odious that many opponents refused to debate him. That had much to do with the party’s history: Its founders in 1972 included former Nazi soldiers, collaborators with the wartime Vichy regime and onetime members of a group that carried out deadly attacks meant to thwart Algeria’s struggle to free itself from French colonial rule.
Mr. Le Pen’s openly racist, antisemitic and anti-gay comments cemented the public’s perception of the party.
Mr. Le Pen, who was in paratrooper units in two colonial wars to suppress the independence movements in Vietnam and Algeria, once said that races “do not have the same abilities, nor the same level of historical evolution,” and he was repeatedly convicted of making antisemitic comments and publicly downplaying the Holocaust. He once compared homosexuality to pedophilia.
In 2002, after Mr. Le Pen surprised many by making it to the second round of the presidential election, left-wing parties called on their members to vote for his conservative opponent, Jacques Chirac. This was the most famous use of a strategy known in French politics as a “republican front,” which has since been used multiple times to stop the far right from taking power.
In that 2002 election, Mr. Le Pen won less than 18 percent of the vote. But when his daughter took over, she began what became known as an “undemonization” strategy, to cleanse the party’s image and broaden its appeal.
She distanced herself from her father’s antisemitic statements, declaring concentration camps “the height of barbarity.” She ousted her father from the party in 2015, when he was its honorary president, and said his repeated Holocaust denial showed that “his goal is to cause harm” to the party. Three years later, she renamed it.
Now the National Rally — after riding successive waves of fear and anger over unchecked immigration, rising inflation and deadly terrorism — is no longer on the fringes of French politics, with some of its policies more widely accepted.
Last summer, during a snap election, another republican front between left-wing and centrist parties prevented a far-right victory. Still, a record 124 National Rally lawmakers now sit in the powerful lower house of Parliament, making it the largest single opposition party.
Though Ms. Le Pen has softened some of the party’s initial hard-line stances, its bedrock focus on identity and its eagerness to change the French Constitution to restrict the rights of foreigners mark it in France as a far-right party, according to experts. Party members argue, for instance, that French people should have priority over even legal migrants in areas like certain social benefits and subsidized housing. That runs counter to the French constitution and Republican ideals, set during the revolution of 1789, which make all people equal, Mr. Camus said.
Many experts have characterized Ms. Le Pen’s “undemonization” campaign as mere marketing, and in the election last summer, many National Rally candidates were castigated for past racist or antisemitic remarks.
Some analysts said the party had no choice but to recognize Mr. Le Pen’s integral role in building its long-lasting, stable and successful movement, which is still dominated by his family.
But the party’s glowing remembrance of Mr. Le Pen was also a way to recast his image — and its own, some experts said.
“Paying tribute to Le Pen ‘undemonizes’ the party even further” by portraying him as an excessive but prescient politician, unfairly condemned for warning about the dangers of immigration, said Nicolas Lebourg, a historian who specializes in the far right.
“People who voted for the first time last year have almost no memory of him,” Mr. Lebourg said.
The tributes, from the party and others, are also evidence that Mr. Le Pen’s ideas — like drastically stemming immigration — are increasingly part of the mainstream.
“The importance that Jean-Marie Le Pen has had in our political life is the consequence of long years of denial and powerlessness on the migration issue,” wrote François-Xavier Bellamy, the leader in the European Parliament of the mainstream conservative Republican party, which historically despised Mr. Le Pen and was thrown into turmoil last year when its then-leader advocated an alliance with the National Rally.
“Those who insult him even in death refuse to first look at their failures,” Mr. Bellamy said.
In an interview with The New York Times in 2018, Mr. Le Pen assessed his own influence: “My ideas have made progress, even in the programs of my opponents,” he said. “That’s why my struggle was not without value.”
Even in death, however, he retains many political enemies, especially on the left. Crowds of hundreds gathered in several cities across France to celebrate his death Tuesday night.
“No, he was not a ‘great servant of France,’” wrote Manuel Bompard, national coordinator for the far-left party France Unbowed. “He was an enemy of the Republic.”
And Mélanie Vogel, a Green party senator, said on X: “His ideas, the danger they represent for our democracies are very much alive. Let us finally defeat his heirs.”
Mr. Le Pen’s long life and political career encompassed the sweep of postwar French history. Even the Élysée Palace, home and office of the French president, who has fought to keep the far right out of power, acknowledged as much, noting in a statement Mr. Le Pen’s five runs for president, his seven terms as a lawmaker in the European Parliament and his roles as a municipal and regional councilor.
“A historic figure of the extreme right,” the statement said, “he played a role in the public life of our country for almost 70 years, which is now a matter for history to judge.”
Ségolène Le Stradic contributed reporting.
Content Source: www.nytimes.com