The Menhir Has Left Us
Part 2

2,177 words

Immigration was already becoming a serious problem in the France of 1973, as conservative elements in the system recognised, but were ultimately unwilling to address. De Gaulle’s successor, President Georges Pompidou, a far better man and leader than his counterparts in British Conservatism or the GOP of his time, complained privately how every time that he wished to implement restrictions on immigration, his party’s major donors in French industry, notably the construction giant Bouygues, lobbied against any such restrictions. Le grand patronat (the captains of industry) would spend money like water to oppose immigration reform, because they wanted a cheap, docile (as they thought) immigrant workforce to diminish the power of the left generally and the communist led trade union (labor union to American readers) the CGT, in particular, which was immensely powerful in both the private and the nationalised sectors of the economy.

French society was then and long had been deeply polarised on class lines and even the better type of system conservative had little appeal to the white working classes, so could not draw on nativist sentiment amongst industrial workers as a counterweight to the demands of industrialists for cheap labour. As we shall see, the Front National would in due course change French politics utterly, with more than a little help from the enigmatic François Mitterand, but in 1973 such changes had yet to come, and would only begin to happen ten years and more into the future.

The potential, however was apparent to any thoughtful rightist half a century ago. Le Pen fully grasped it but it took him many, many long and hard years on the fringes of politics before he could even partly realise it. He was to have his share of good and ill luck on the way, as we shall see.

The suppression of l’Ordre Nouveau might have been expected to leave the field clear for Le Pen, whose courage, dynamism and gifts as a public speaker won him many admirers in the small but very active nationalist right.

What was more, standing for the fifth electoral district of Paris in the elections to the National Assembly in March 1973, he polled a respectable 5.2%, whereas the average vote for the FN’s candidates in its first electoral outing was a paltry 1.3%, so he certainly appeared to be an asset to his party, but life is never so simple as that.

A marked character trait of le menhir’s that I have already noted was that he disliked taking orders intensely, but enjoyed giving them much better. He certainly possessed the authoritarian temperament to an advanced degree and did not brook dissent (traits that his youngest daughter, Marine Le Pen, has inherited).

The result was that in very short order, a major split occurred in the ranks of the newly founded party. Many important figures who were not inclined to accept Le Pen’s authoritarian leadership and wished to have a more collective form of internal governance left the Front National in October 1973, at first behind a loosely constituted steering committee, confusingly called Faire Front, but going on in 1974 to form a rival party, le Parti des Forces Nouvelles (PFN).

The dissidents included such considerable personages as Alain Robert, the founder of the notoriously violent right-wing student organisation GUD, which literally fought back against far left students, returning blow for blow (or two blows for a blow), Anne Méaux, one of the few women to play a leading role on the nationalist right, who had already been a committed militant at fourteen, the brilliant cartoonist Jack Marchal, and the much loved François Brigneau, a man whom I had the pleasure and honour of meeting in Paris some forty and more years ago, a journalist and former milicien (a member of the paramilitary police force working with the Germans during the Occupation under the leadership of Joseph Darnand, whose hatred for the Resistance was legendary) and the friend and biographer of Philippe Henriot, a famous collaborator known as the “French Goebbels” for his gifts as an orator and propagandist, whom the Resistance murdered in the Maison de la Radio France as he was preparing one of his broadcasts.

Tixier-Vignancourt himself was later to join them, and for a decade, it was far from evident which of the rival parties would prevail, especially as the PFN maintained close links with Alain de Benoist’s Nouvelle Droite, whereas Le Pen and Alain de Benoist cordially disliked one another, the first thinking the second an effete intellectual who would never get his hands dirty with real politics, the second thinking the first a boor and a reactionary boor to boot.

On 2nd April 1974, President Pompidou died in the fifth year of his seven year presidential term. His aides had kept the gravity of his condition from the general public and even much of the political class till the end, indeed, he was still effectively discharging the duties of his high office two days before his death. New elections followed. The first round was on 5th May, the second on 19th May.

The Front National, now bereft of many of its best people, prepared to fight the elections as best it could. Le Pen was nominated as the FN’s candidate, polling 190,921 votes of the 25,538,636 cast in the first round, a mere 0.75%. He asked his supporters to vote for the mainstream conservative, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing in the second round, while Faire Front supported Giscard in both rounds. François Mitterand, fighting his second presidential campaign, easily won the first round but was narrowly defeated in the second by Giscard, who polled 50.81% to Mitterand’s 49.19%.

This outcome can hardly have been encouraging to Le Pen (though he was quite a friend of Giscard d’Estaing, once again, a far better man than pseudo-conservatives in the Anglosphere, whom Le Pen had known since 1950 and who entertained him as a house guest and often discussed politics with Jean-Marie after his term in office).

While Le Pen’s expectations cannot have been high, 0.75% was a paltry share of the vote. What was more, he could see the likelihood of Faire Front evolving (as indeed it did) into a formidable rival to his little party. His own circumstances were moreover difficult, with no reliable regular income and a wife and three daughters to support.

So indeed matters continued in the early years of Giscard’s presidency, but to paraphrase the unforgettable introduction to For a Few Dollars More, sometimes when life afflicts us with tribulations, death offers solutions.

On 25th September 1976, Jean-Marie’s old friend, Hubert Lambert, heir to the Lambert cement factory fortune, died at the age of only 42, childless. He left his vast fortune and his grand house at Montretout-Saint-Cloud just outside Paris to Le Pen. As we shall shortly see, Jean-Marie was to need a new house a few weeks later. When Hubert Lambert’s relatives challenged his will on the ground of insanity, Le Pen was able to negotiate a division of the estate with them that left him a rich man.

Such are the vicissitudes of human affairs that a few weeks later, death almost claimed Le Pen himself. On the night of 1st to 2nd November 1976, a powerful bomb containing about twenty kilograms (44 pounds) of dynamite exploded on the balcony of the Le Pen family house in the 15th arrondissement of Paris. Le Pen’s then wife, Pierrette, recalls running into the bedroom of her youngest daughter, Marine, fearing that the child, then aged eight, would jump out of bed and her feet would be lacerated by shards of broken glass. Marine herself has, unsurprisingly, never forgotten that night, which, as she said, brought home to her that her family was not going to be treated in the same way as other families. They would all be targets of her father’s murderous enemies, who were quite prepared to blow up three children to hurt their father.

The police investigation into this attempt at murder led nowhere. A shadowy “anti-fascist” group claimed responsibility, but some suspect that angry relatives of Hubert Lambert might have been behind the attack and cunningly sought to shift the blame to Le Pen’s political opponents. After almost half a century, it is very unlikely that we shall ever know the truth.

Still, after surviving this outrage, and with a new house and a large fortune, Le Pen was now in the happy position of never needing to worry about money again. He had amply sufficient funds to subsidise the FN’s activities in bitter competition with the PFN.

For the next several years, these activities were not marked by any conspicuous success, indeed, by any worthwhile successes at all. Le Pen once again contested the fifth electoral district of Paris in the elections to the National Assembly on 12th March 1978, but his share of the vote fell from 5.2% to 3.9%, despite the more than ample funds available to him in support of his campaign.

Much worse was to follow a few days later on 18th March 1978, when one of his closest colleagues, the revisionist historian and member of the FN’s national directorate, François Duprat, was murdered. As Duprat turned the keys in the ignition of his car, which had been booby-trapped, it exploded, killing Duprat and crippling his wife. Two Jewish terrorist cells claiming to further the remembrance of the Holocaust (which we are at little obvious risk of forgetting) claimed responsibility.

Le Pen did not abandon the struggle, but the loss of so well-known and committed a friend hurt him deeply, nor were his efforts bearing much fruit politically. To many young militants, the FN appeared old-fashioned and backward-looking compared to its lively rival. A few weeks after Le Pen’s unsuccessful electoral foray on 12th March 1978, it was the PFN that got the headlines when its delegates were invited to represent France at the first convention of the European Right held in Rome from 19th to 21st April 1978 under the auspices of the Movimento Sociale Italiano (the direct heirs to Mussolini) and their Spanish friends in Fuerza Nueva.

Le Pen cannot have been especially pleased to learn that his old chief, Tixier-Vignancourt, was chosen as the representative of the French radical right to address a mass rally in Naples on 22nd April 1978 with the MSI’s Giorgio Almirante and Blas Piñar of Fuerza Nueva, but unlike the MSI, which did well, the PFN polled poorly in the elections to the European Parliament in 1979, taking a mere 1.3% of the vote, while the FN chose not to contest the European elections of that year at all.

President Giscard d’Estaing’s seven-year mandate expired in 1981. New presidential elections followed, but for Le Pen only disappointment came of them (at first). In the medium term, much gain was to follow.

A peculiarity of the French electoral system is that a candidate for the presidency of the Republic must be nominated by 500 so-called grands électeurs, who are all elected officials, local mayors, councillors and the like. Nominating a nationalist candidate takes some courage, though in fairness, the more mainstream conservative parties have on occasion encouraged grands électeurs bearing allegiance to them to do so in order to broaden the field.

Le Pen’s problem was that he and the PFN’s would-be candidate, Pascal Gauchon, were both fishing in the same pool. In the end, each found more than 400 grands électeurs but neither could find 500, so effectively stymying one another’s hopes.

The outcome of the 1981 election was however to be the making of Le Pen, unlikely though it seemed at the time. While the incumbent Giscard d’Estaing led the field in the first round, it was third time lucky for Mitterand, who overtook his old rival in the second round, winning 51.76% of the vote to Giscard’s 48.24%, helped by scandalous press reports, suggesting that both Giscard d’Estaing and his wife, who had unwisely accepted the hospitality of the utterly deranged Emperor Bokassa of the Central African Empire, a French client state, had inadvertently eaten part of the disgraced former Minister of Finances of the CAE, who was served up as one of the dishes at a banquet.

Well do I remember the leftist posters plastered all over Paris at the time with the slogan “Giscard anthropophage” (Giscard the cannibal), which certainly added a piquant flavour to the campaign (and, I do not doubt, the banquet, though in truth it seems that the French ambassador, not the President, was the unwitting participant in the cannibal feast). But I must not be so Eurocentric. Autres pays, autres moeurs, as the French saying has it.

For the first time in many a long year, the left was in power. I personally witnessed the scenes of delirious rejoicing at the narrow defeat of the haughty and unloved Giscard, seeing crowds of young Socialists dancing in front of the trains at Châteauroux station on the Paris-Toulouse-La Tour de Carol mainline, but Mitterand was to find governing more difficult than campaigning.

“To govern is to choose” it has been said. Strange, unintended (?) consequences indeed were to follow from Mitterand’s choices, the unlikely beneficiary of which on a grand scale indeed would be the non-candidate of 1981, J-M Le Pen.

To be continued . . .