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Once called ‘the devil of the Republic’, Le Pen died knowing his ideas are gaining currency

Le Pen used to boast ‘I say out loud what others think in silence’. That sentiment is echoed by Trump and users of Elon Musk’s X

Jean Marie Le Pen at the European Parliament in 2014. He was convicted more than 25 times during his career for defending war crimes, provoking hatred and discrimination, anti-Semitism and public insults. Photograph: Christian Lutz/AP
Jean Marie Le Pen at the European Parliament in 2014. He was convicted more than 25 times during his career for defending war crimes, provoking hatred and discrimination, anti-Semitism and public insults. Photograph: Christian Lutz/AP

Jean-Marie Le Pen, the extreme right-wing leader who died on January 7th at the age of 96, was the granddaddy of post second World War nationalist populist politicians.

Donald Trump and a gaggle of like-minded leaders – several of whom have received Elon Musk’s imprimatur – in Austria, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Slovakia, Sweden and the UK, may not have taken direct inspiration from Le Pen. But the man known to detractors as “the devil of the Republic” died knowing that his goals of mass deportation of immigrants and discriminatory “national preference” have gained wide currency on the far right in Europe and the US.

The xenophobic, anti-immigrant and racist politics which Le Pen pioneered since he cofounded the National Front (FN) in 1972 have been labelled the Reactionary International. It is on the rise throughout what was formerly called the civilised world.

In France, Le Pen’s daughter Marine may succeed president Emmanuel Macron. Marine Le Pen “undemonised” her father’s party by publicly disowning his oft-repeated statement that the Holocaust was “a detail” of the second World War. But she did not address his more outrageously racist claims, for example that the intellectual growth of Muslims is stunted because their religion does not discourage masturbation.

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Despite his extreme views and erratic behaviour, Trump was able to take over the Republican Party. Le Pen’s anti-Semitism made him a pariah, shunned by mainstream French conservatives. By expelling her father from the FN, rechristening it the National Rally (RN) and renouncing anti-Semitism, Marine Le Pen won over much of the conservative, neo-Gaullist Les Républicains party. Yet hatred of immigrants and Islamophobia remain an integral part of the RN’s DNA.

Back in September 2001, party workers at what was still FN headquarters broke out the champagne on the night of the 9/11 atrocities. The subsequent, decades-long spate of Islamist attacks in the US and Europe, and mass migration sparked by wars, famine and global warming, fuelled the rise of the far right.

Le Monde newspaper called Le Pen a “Trumpist character before his time,” because he “shamelessly exploited the fears which torment the popular and middle classes in the era of globalisation: immigration, the lack of security, the spectre of decline”.

Le Pen and Trump resembled one another: truculent, boastful, vengeful, unrepentant and deliberately provocative; they filled a need for bread and circuses. They dismissed criticism with tirades against political correctness and woke-ism. Both turned politics into a family business. French media likened the life of the Le Pen clan in a mansion overlooking Paris – which Le Pen inherited in dubious circumstances from a supporter – to the television series Dallas.

Le Pen was as polarising as Trump. While supporters this week eulogised him as “le Menhir”, after the megalithic stones found in his native Brittany, hundreds gathered in Paris, Lyons and Marseilles to celebrate his death.

People gather at Place de la République in Paris after it was announced that far-right politician Jean Marie Le Pen had died on January 7th. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
People gather at Place de la République in Paris after it was announced that far-right politician Jean Marie Le Pen had died on January 7th. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

Le Pen was convicted more than 25 times for defending war crimes, provoking hatred and discrimination, anti-Semitism and public insults. By election day, Donald Trump had racked up 34 felony indictments, one conviction, two impeachments and six bankruptcies. Like Le Pen, Trump claimed the justice system was rigged against him.

When his political career stalled in the late 1960s, Le Pen temporarily became a record producer. One of the records he published, entitled The Third Reich: Songs of the German Revolution, led to his first conviction for defending war crimes.

Le Pen told the far-right newspaper Combat in 1962 that, as a paratrooper in the Foreign Legion during the Battle of Algiers, he tortured members of the FLN liberation movement “because it had to be done”. Though he later retracted the statement, a Nazi dagger engraved with Le Pen’s name and found in a torture room in the Casbah led to the dismissal of a lawsuit filed by Le Pen for defamation.

Two weeks before the US presidential election, John Kelly, the retired Marine general who served as Trump’s chief of staff from 2017 until 2019, told The New York Times and The Atlantic that Trump met the definition of a fascist and that during his first term, Trump suggested that Adolf Hitler “did some good things”. Kelly also quoted Trump saying that he needed “German generals . . . Hitler’s generals”.

Le Pen, like Trump, evaluated women based on their sexual attractiveness. And he could be every bit as lewd as Trump. Over lunch with a handful of journalists, including this correspondent, on the eve of his qualification for the runoff in the French presidential election in 2002, Le Pen judged then first lady Bernadette Chirac “un-f**kable” and denigrated political adversaries as “men who could no longer honour their wives”. Le Pen later blamed the demographic decline of the West on “sexual egalitarianism”.

Who could forget the “Access Hollywood” video in which Trump advised Billy Bush to “Grab ‘em by the pussy”? A US federal appeals court on December 30th upheld Trump’s conviction for the sexual abuse of E Jean Carroll and denied his request for a new trial.

In both men, large, heavy frames and jutting chins created an impression of powerful physical presence. When Trump’s ear was grazed by a would-be assassin’s bullet last July 13th, his facial expression and defiant, clenched fist constituted a pose reminiscent of Le Pen.

Le Pen used to boast that “I say out loud what others think in silence”. That sentiment is echoed by Trump and users of Elon Musk’s X – except that far right followers have been freed of their inhibitions. Trump’s denigration of Mexicans as rapists and murderers did not prevent him winning a substantial portion of the Hispanic vote in November.

Le Pen considered Charles de Gaulle a traitor for giving up l’Algérie française. He had fought in the last gasps of French empire, in Indochina and Algeria and in the failed Anglo-French attempt to retake the Suez Canal in 1956. Trump too displays colonial longings. On the day of Le Pen’s death, the president-elect told journalists at Mar-a-Lago of his designs on Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal.