The amazing thing about Donald Trump’s arrival in office for his second term has been the sheer consequentiality of it. What felt like an inflection has proved a revolution. Dreams that seemed alive to some people just six months ago—transcending binary sexuality, for example—are dead and discredited. So are the state mechanisms by which such dreams were imposed—affirmative action, speech codes, and so on. Though revolutions often fail or turn dangerous, they are hard to undo, once the spell of the old regime has been broken.
But what was this regime? What was it about? The life of its most dogged and enduring opponent, the French populist leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, may suggest an answer. Le Pen died in January at age 96, two weeks before Trump returned to office. Half a century ago, Le Pen called for an uprising against a dawning era of human rights, abortion, sexual liberation, transnational governance, and—above all—mass migration. He won the near-unanimous loathing of his country’s journalists and intellectuals, who accused him of racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism. For a time he was the most despised major politician in the West, rivaled only by Britain’s Enoch Powell. Not all of his views have been vindicated—far from it. But his general vision, which passed through Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul and Brexit on its way to Donald Trump, has triumphed. It is worth looking at what he got right and what he got wrong. By September 2021, when I spent an afternoon interviewing him at his house in Rueil-Malmaison, west of Paris, he recognized that he had been mistaken in some of his most passionately held positions. The same, of course, can be said of his critics. Though certain of their arguments were well founded, others were opportunistic inventions of a power structure that despaired of besting Le Pen in debate.
Like other populists he was a has-been by the time he really hit his stride. It’s amazing what a combination of longevity and precocity will do. When Le Pen was born in Brittany in 1928, Raymond Poincaré was France’s prime minister and Calvin Coolidge the American president. Le Pen was a child studying classics with the Jesuits in the 1930s, a teenager when his fisherman father died after his boat struck a mine in the 1940s, and a member of the National Assembly—elected for the Left Bank!—in the 1950s. A soldier, he was shipped to Vietnam in 1954, just missing the catastrophic encirclement of French troops at Dien Bien Phu, and to Algeria later that decade. Suppressing the anti-colonial rebellion there became his passion. In 1972, he co-founded the National Front, the political party he would lead till passing it to his daughter Marine in 2011. In 1976, an attacker blew up his house—a crime that was never solved. In the 1980s he became a member of the European Parliament in Brussels and spent more than three decades there—the longest-serving French member of a body he loathed. He started regularly taking 15% or so of the vote in presidential elections at home, and in 2002 broke through to the second round. Though he was defeated by Jacques Chirac, the slap to the three big establishment parties—Socialists, Gaullists, liberals—is still felt today. And today, the National Rally, as Marine Le Pen renamed her father’s party, is bigger than any of them. It is more popular, in fact, than any party in France, commanding a solid third of the vote and kept out of office only by ever-more-elaborate deals between the establishment parties.
Le Pen was, simply put, a nationalist, but there were three causes he cared for especially. First, he opposed Communism from his earliest youth until that movement’s extinction. Second, he had an imperial vision of France: when Charles de Gaulle, as president, showed a weakening resolve to keep Algeria French, Le Pen declared himself de Gaulle’s enemy and drew close to army officers suspected of disloyalty. Finally, he fought immigration. He did so almost alone. In 1972 France enacted its so-called Pleven Law, meant to fight racism. It could be described as France’s equivalent of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. But there was a twist: France’s principle of non-discrimination applies not only to races and sexes but also to citizenship status. Newly arrived migrants had the same rights to benefits, housing, and so on that French citizens did. As historian Éric Zemmour has noted, this turned the Pleven Law into a “program to melt the French nation into a planetary magma.” Bad enough for France. For Le Pen and others, it became impossible to argue for any limits on immigration without being accused of racism. The perfectly innocent expression “préférence nationale” took on sinister associations in the French public debate, the way “states’ rights” did in ours.
The arrival of only a few million immigrants by the late 1970s struck Le Pen as a “demographic cataclysm,” and his alarm changed to despair as the migrant population mounted. Still, it was striking how flexible he could be when describing that cataclysm’s cultural roots. He insisted that U.N. refugee treaties be exited or repudiated, noting the difference between “accepting a nineteenth-century violinist persecuted by the tsar and hundreds of thousands pressing at the gates.” But he considered France’s demographic crisis to have been self-inflicted. His understanding of feminism’s role in it was subtle. Having three accomplished daughters, he shared many of feminism’s aspirations and assumptions. “There’s a great temptation to measure up,” he said in 2021. “And to win. Because [women] often concentrate better, and work better, than young men…. But the consequences of this choice are fatal.” He meant fatal for society. “We can survive without female technicians,” he said. “We cannot survive without mothers.”
He was open to the idea that the great obsession of his young life—his battle against de Gaulle to preserve French Algeria—might have been a mistake. For had Algeria remained French the level of migration from there would have been even higher than it was, and the demographic changes more intense. “Everyone was with us,” he recalled. “Even so, it is probable that Algerian independence spared us a problem of integration that would have been insoluble.” He went even further, describing de Gaulle as the great leader of postwar France. “He was an adversary. I fought his politics. But I must recognize his gifts as a head of state,” he said. “Not to mention that he was a great writer. As soldiers often are.”
After Dreux
In 1983, by allying itself with Jacques Chirac’s Rally for the Republic party, the National Front managed to take a few seats in municipal elections in the medieval city of Dreux, west of Paris. Dreux, with about 30,000 inhabitants, had been swamped by immigration, and unemployment was high. The French Left reacted to Le Pen’s modest victory as if it were Mussolini’s March on Rome. There really did seem to be something in the air. Deregulation and free-market capitalism had been sweeping the world since Margaret Thatcher’s election in Britain in 1979. In 1980 Ronald Reagan followed in the United States. But in France in 1981 the Socialist François Mitterrand took power at the head of a “united Left” that included Communists. He bucked the trend, nationalizing industries, shortening the work week, lowering the retirement age, and imposing a high wealth tax. The experiment collapsed, along with the economy, in 1983. France’s working class discovered that Socialists were unable to protect them against the old dangers, like unemployment, and unwilling to protect them against new ones, like mass immigration. Le Pen became the defender of a class that had suddenly found itself without defenders.
He was very good at it. In the winter of 1984—after Dreux and just before his breakthrough in European Union elections that spring—Le Pen was invited onto the popular television show L’heure de vérité (Moment of Truth) for an extensive interview with several of the country’s top journalists. It was an ambush. The financial writer Jean-Louis Servan-Schreiber peppered Le Pen with racist statements drawn from various sources, many of them years old and none of which had been verifiably made by Le Pen himself, but all of which involved a person who could be tied to him in some way.
“I’m going to give you a chance to make your thoughts a bit clearer,” Servan-Schreiber said. “I quote: ‘In the course of history, two people have claimed to belong to a superior race—the Jews and the Germans. It didn’t work out well for either of them.’ In other words, Nazism and Judaism—”
Le Pen looked sincerely puzzled. “That passage comes from where?”
“It’s from your own weekly, RLP Hebdo, from June 30, 1983, under the signature of André Figueras.”
“Well, listen, why don’t you ask Mr. Figueras?”
It went on like this all night. A former member of his party had said something bad about Jews in the 1970s. Another had described Simone Veil, author of France’s abortion law, as a tricoteuse (a slang term for women who during the French Revolution incited murder while doing their knitting). By the time it was through, the country was thoroughly polarized. On the one hand, it was clear that a number of Le Pen’s acquaintances had a preoccupation with Jews—an alarming thing in 1984, when defeat and occupation at the hands of the Nazis were vivid in the mind of any Frenchman over 45, and there were still concentration camp survivors in the prime of their working lives. Le Pen claimed to be fighting Communism, but so did a lot of people at the height of the Cold War. Fighting Communism did not require that voters tolerate clowns.
On the other hand, the entire exercise seemed to be aimed at amalgamating Le Pen’s views on immigration and abortion with the worst enormities of modern times. There was something scurrilous about Servan-Schreiber’s drawing up a list of things for which Le Pen was not responsible and calling on him to disassociate (désolidariser) himself from them. That was a problem not only for Le Pen. The French had begun to notice that many journalists considered themselves entitled to drive dissidents out of public life on the flimsiest of accusations. Holding a politician to account no longer required proving wrongdoing. It was enough to assert that he had “refused to disassociate himself from” a misdeed he hadn’t committed, or “shared a platform with” somebody he didn’t know.
Le Détail
Le Pen was a formidable orator, organizer, and showman who played a part in launching the most important worldwide political movement of the past 50 years. Yet at his death, French newspapers summed up that career with a single incident: if you ask a French man-on-the-street for proof of Le Pen’s villainy, you will likely hear that he once described something about the Holocaust as a “detail.” The weekly L’Obs, in the massive obituary edition that it ran in the week of his death, described him as l’homme du détail.
As noted, Le Pen had anti-Semitic companions. He gave signs of an anti-Semitic disposition himself. What the nature of this anti-Semitism was has been the subject of interesting debates since his death. “This may shock you,” the sociologist Jean-Yves Camus told L’Obs for its Le Pen obituary issue, “but I’ve always thought that his prejudices against Jews were a tissue of traditional prejudices, not things specific to the extreme right.” Le Pen’s interview on the show Le Grand Jury in 1987, the heart of which can be watched on the website INA.fr, is consistent with that reading. As evidence of Holocaust denial or similar ideological depravity, it is underwhelming.
The interview reveals as much about Le Pen’s attitudes toward journalists as it does about his attitude toward ethnic minorities. “Détail” is a word Le Pen was in the habit of using when he thought his interlocutors were missing the forest for the trees—he had used it, for example, to express his impatience with the above-mentioned journalists who had asked him to explain why a colleague had described Simone Veil as a tricoteuse. In 1987, the German historian of fascism Ernst Nolte had just completed his European Civil War, which attributed Nazi violence to the example set by Communists, and launched a historiographical civil war of sorts in the German academy. The English historian David Irving was beginning to advance his claims that the Holocaust had been carried out without Hitler’s knowledge.
French journalists were eager to know if Le Pen embraced such Holocaust revisionism, as it was then called, and it is to this line of questioning that he is clearly responding. “I don’t say that the gas chambers didn’t exist,” he said. “I haven’t been able to visit any myself, and I haven’t made a special study of the question, but I think it’s a detail of the history of the Second World War.” He seems to question the consensus view that 6 million were killed in the Holocaust. (“There were many dead, many hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of Jewish dead…but also of people who weren’t Jews.”) But that is not wholly clear either, because at one point Le Pen says something that indicates he’s actually talking about what proportion of those killed were killed in death camps: “The question that was asked was how these people were killed or not, wasn’t it?” But he is, above all, resentful of the tone of the questions: “Are you trying to tell me that this is a revealed truth that everyone is required to believe?” he asks. “That it’s a moral obligation?”
A system of steering public opinion by means of taboos was suited to the 1980s. It may have been unfair to Mr. Le Pen personally but, for French voters, protecting society against right-wing movements justified tolerating a few journalistic popinjays. The system was not stable, though. Taboos erected around causes universally deemed worthy are the most powerful social institutions in human life. For that reason, they attract people who are attracted by power. The more irreproachable the cause, the stronger the attraction. That Holocaust remembrance in France, like civil rights in the United States, could be weaponized against political challengers did not discredit the moral core of it. But Le Pen’s voters noticed that his adversaries were trying to prosecute him out of the public square.
In a way, it helped him. The Pleven Law, again like the Civil Rights Act, generated litigation, giving a semi-official role to a non-profit sector that came to think of itself as an anti-racist police. The French referred to these pressure groups simply as les associations. Once the devastating effectiveness of guilt-by-association was proved for race questions, the practice became general. If Le Pen could be held responsible for anything another member of the National Front said, then ordinary people could be held responsible for any part of their political outlook that overlapped with Le Pen’s. This felt like censorship, and not just to Le Pen voters. Baiting of the media seemed to earn him public support.
When Communism ended, conservatives—who most of the time account for a majority of the French electorate—settled on immigration as their country’s main problem. Suddenly, Le Pen was more than a poor imitation of an anti-Communist statesman: he was, for all his flaws, a founding father of the immigration reform movement. Thereafter, the main business of France’s media and political establishment became the protection of its position through the construction of further taboos.
Cordon Sanitaire
Days after his death, The New York Times wrote that Le Pen had been “considered so odious that many opponents refused to debate him.” One could just as easily say that he was so formidable in debate that his opponents invoked his odiousness to avoid humiliation. Le Pen was more like Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi than Donald Trump—he had a deep classical education and was at ease in his country’s literature and culture. In the elegance of his spoken French, if in nothing else, he resembled de Gaulle. For a while in the 1980s he used to debate the equally attention-seeking Bernard Tapie, the late Socialist businessman and progressive. With Tapie he sounded an irascible note, reminiscent of Captain Haddock: “You’re a loudmouth, a braggart, and a bluffer! …Don’t threaten me physically, Monsieur Tapie, or things could get hot for you!”
In 2002, when Le Pen made his shocking advance into the second round of elections, Jacques Chirac announced he would not debate him, saying, “I cannot accept the banalization of intolerance and hate.” This marked the national triumph of the cordon sanitaire, a strategy of refusing all recognition and cooperation with Le Pen. First proposed by Socialists in 1987, not long after Chirac and Le Pen’s electoral alliance in Dreux, it has prevailed ever since, to disastrous effect. Singling out elected representatives for exclusion from supposedly neutral government institutions is a form of tyranny of the majority. In a populist era, it tends to win short-term tactical gains for the establishment at the cost of validating the ideological vision of the party it tries to exclude: the AfD in Germany, the Trump-era Republican Party in the United States, and the National Front in France. In all of these places, there has been a penultimate period when the establishment conservative party gets one last chance to prove itself to voters alienated from the political system—and then fails to. That moment came for the United States with the Bushes, father and son. For France it came in 2007 with Nicolas Sarkozy, who, by promising to take harsh measures against immigration, cut Le Pen’s vote to 10%. (In Germany, that moment appears to be coming now for Friedrich Merz and his Christian Democrats.)
In a recent interview in Le Figaro, French historian Arnaud Teyssier noted that as early as 1991 the Gaullist minister Philippe Séguin had warned about the temptation to call for republican solidarity against a single party deemed to be fascist. “A republican front,” Séguin said, “is the best way to make Le Pen the pivot-point of French politics and to bring him to 40% in the polls.” History has proved Séguin right on all counts. A critical moment came in 2005 when the European Union tried to pass a “constitution” that would have transferred much of the historic nations’ sovereignty to Brussels. France held a referendum and all three establishment parties eagerly backed a “yes” vote. Alone among big parties, the National Front said no—and so did the French public, overwhelmingly.
Le Pen, meanwhile, was getting old. In the year of the constitutional referendum, he told a right-wing magazine that in France “the German occupation was not particularly inhumane”—which is true only if your benchmark is the German occupation of Poland. What is more, it brought les associations after him. For three decades after 1984, Le Pen had “defendant” as his job description. He was sued for this, that, and the other thing. He was badgered about his détail remark, and sued for not being willing to repudiate it.
People came after him, yes, but there was also a frivolity about him. He tended to fritter away his time, and his followers’. In 1998, the National Front split in two. Most of its senior members, wanting the movement to be more like a real political party, abandoned Le Pen for youthful, popular Bruno Mégret. Le Pen’s eldest daughter, Marie-Caroline, was among them. Le Pen pulled off the coup of finishing second in 2002, but that was the climax of his career. His decline thereafter was steep. It was natural to wonder if he had any regrets.
“Regrets about what?” he replied when I asked him that in 2021.
Regrets that, for example, if I had called for this or that in a given year, everything would have come out differently? That if I had summoned another politician to leadership instead of the one I called, that it could have been different for me, and for France? That was never the goal of my life. The goal of my life was to express my liberty…come what may…without considering my interests or the future.
Many people suspected as much of Le Pen when he was vaulted into the second round in 2002—that he was actually a bit taken aback. At heart, he didn’t seem to want to be president. This would cause a rupture when the party was taken over by his daughter Marine, who did. Marine, now in her fifties, shared her father’s skepticism of elites, the E.U., and immigration—but also her generation’s repugnance at the extremist tendencies of the 20th-century French Right. She set out to make the party less “diabolical,” particularly in matters touching on anti-Semitism, and when her father engaged in one of his occasional provocations, she expelled him from it.
It caused relatively little stir. The National Rally, as Marine Le Pen has renamed it, is now the largest political party in France. Only the persistence of the cordon sanitaire keeps her out of power, though the justifications for resorting to it have become increasingly bizarre. Last summer, French president Emmanuel Macron joined with Jean-Luc Mélenchon of La France Insoumise (“France Unbowed”) in a “republican front” against Le Pen’s daughter in the second round of national elections, even as Mélenchon pursued an increasingly racial, sectarian, and anti-Israel politics on behalf of the immigrant-descended population that he calls the “New France.” Possibly due to the attachment of immigrant groups to the Palestinian cause, the Le Pen party, now firmly pro-Israel, took a sizable percentage of the Jewish vote in 2024. Even the Holocaust historian and activist Serge Klarsfeld, long an opinion leader for leftists in Paris, backed the Le Pen-led “Right” over the Mélenchon-led “Left.”
The week Jean-Marie Le Pen died, The Economist ran a feature titled: “How extremist politics became mainstream in France.” The extremism was never all on one side. At just that moment, Le Pen’s opponents were sipping champagne and setting off fireworks in the Place de la République in Paris to express their joy at his death. A few days later, others would desecrate his family’s graves in Brittany. Certainly, he set a kind of extremism in motion in the 1970s and ’80s. But it became outright dangerous to France only when interested elites tried to freeze out dissent—first through moral disapproval, then through litigation, and finally by extending the definition of “extremism” to embrace much of mainstream politics, from skepticism about immigration to defense of traditional sexual morality. French people didn’t want to follow Le Pen—and they never did. But the country changed and his ideas made inroads. Eventually voters, in France as elsewhere, would come to think of populism as the worst form of political uprising except for all the others.
