The Menhir Has Left Us

1,536 words

Yesterday, France and Europe lost a great son. The death of Jean-Marie Le Pen at the age of 96 marks the end of an era in politics. Fuller appreciations for his long and eventful life will come in time from biographers, friendly and hostile. What follows is a brief envoi for a man whom I had the privilege of meeting several times and grew to respect greatly, without necessarily agreeing with him on every point of detail (a subject to which I will return).

Jean-Marie Le Pen was born so long ago as 20th June 1928 in Trinité-sur-Mer, then a fishing village (but now more of a tourist resort) in Brittany, France’s most Celtic province, where the Bréton language (closely akin to Welsh and Cornish, and far more distantly related to Gaelic) still clings on in a few remote communities.  The very family name would be familiar to a Cornishman: By Pol, Tre, and Pen, you may know the Cornish men, wrote Sir Walter Scott—Kenilworth, Chap. I.

Brittany is a mysterious land, a world away from Paris, where ancient traditions cling on, marked by its granite standing stones or menhirs. Later on this son of Brittany was to earn the nickname of le menhir, of which he was very proud. Unlike some Brétons, however, he never felt any difficulty or contradiction in proudly embracing both a Bréton heritage and a French national identity.

The family background was modest. His father, Jean, was a veteran of the First World War and a fisherman by trade, his mother a seamstress. Tragedy struck when Jean Le Pen was killed in 1942 after his fishing vessel struck a mine and Jean-Marie was left destitute and reliant on public assistance in the harsh conditions of occupied France, Brittany being one of the regions under direct German control, not under the effective control of the Vichy government, but where the occupiers, more preoccupied with watching the Atlantic for Allied warships, left the day to day life of local people in the hands of the local French administrators.

Hardened by such a childhood, young Jean-Marie volunteered for the reconstituted French army in November 1944, but was rejected as too young to serve according to French law. His ambiguous relationship with France’s ambiguous history was soon illustrated, for by early 1945, he made his first foray into politics, affixing two home-made posters to the walls of the local mairie (town hall), protesting about the vicious persecution and public humiliation of women alleged to have had relationships with German soldiers and sailors at the hands of so-called resistance fighters, in fact mostly communists who prudently waited until after the liberation before becoming resistance fighters.

We next hear of Jean-Marie as a student in Paris c. 1951 in the Law Faculty of the ancient and traditionally right-wing Paris University, the Sorbonne. By the time that I had followed in his footsteps (1983) the Law Faculty had moved to the Rue d’Assas, where it rejoiced in the name of la Fac facho. His studies seem to have been punctuated by frequent fights between right and left-wing student groups; Jean-Marie always in the front ranks of the rightists.

Fighting was plainly to his liking, for now that he was amply of military age, he volunteered for the notoriously tough paratroopers, was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant and made more than 200 successful jumps.

Le Pen served in French Indochina (of which Vietnam was part) between 1953 and 1955, fighting against the Viet Minh, predecessors of the Vietcong, then in perhaps the last hurrah of European colonialism, the Suez campaign of 1956, and finally in Algeria in 1957, where the French were fighting and very slowly losing a vicious colonial war.

Les paras were at the forefront of the fighting, and quickly acquired a not wholly undeserved reputation for brutality. Le Pen denied personal involvement in the torture of prisoners with electricity but admitted that he was present when such torture was inflicted.

Even before he was demobbed, Le Pen was elected to the French National Assembly in 1956 for the first time, as right-hand man to the romantic reactionary small shop-keeper, Pierre Poujade. Many of those who would later become involved in the Front National served their political apprenticeships with Poujade, but perhaps characteristically of Jean-Marie, of whom a friend said that he would take orders when in the army but never at any other time in his life, he soon fell out with Poujade and went his own way.

In 1958 he was re-elected as deputy for the Fifth Arrondissement of Paris (the student quarter, that ten years later mobilised for the left) under the banner of a small right-wing coalition, the CNIP, but in 1962 he and other supporters of the war to keep Algeria under French control were thrown out by an electorate that was war weary and judged (with hindsight, correctly) that the game was not worth the candle. In this respect, it must be said, General de Gaulle was right and his enemies were wrong.

Le Pen was very embittered against de Gaulle for allowing the independence of Algeria. By 1965 he had found a new political mentor, much more sulphurous than Pierre Poujade, namely Maître Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancourt, an eminent criminal defence lawyer famous for representing many of the French army officers who had conspired to overthrow (indeed, kill) de Gaulle for his perceived betrayal of the Algerian colonists, but had been an enemy of de Gaulle’s long before then, as Undersecretary of State for Justice at Vichy.

Tixier-Vignancourt had a lucky escape in 1944, when following a faction fight at Vichy, he was dismissed from the government and put in a concentration camp, prudently legging it as soon as American troops arrived, not waiting for anyone to tell the Americans that their fellow captive was a notorious collaborator and friend of the Germans, whose presence in the ranks of the prisoners rather than the guards perplexed his fellow inmates!

Le Pen, who was only 17 in 1945, and so a few years too young to have been caught up in the twin tragedies of resistance and collaboration, by 1965 therefore found himself close to the most important and high-profile living apologist for Marshal Pétain and Vichy, who ran for the presidency against the hated de Gaulle in that year.

Perhaps however I should say, only the most important open apologist, for there was another man who had known Tixier-Vignancourt well in the old days at Vichy and was himself to give Le Pen his really big break in politics, namely François Mitterand, once a member of the very violent pre-war ultra-nationalist group la Cagoule (”the hooded ones”) then a high-ranking civil servant at Vichy and decorated in the wartime years with the francisque, the highest civilian decoration of the collaborationist regime but by 1965, the Socialist candidate for the presidency and later, remarkably, Socialist President of France in 1981 and facilitator of the Front National’s great electoral breakthrough in 1984. Unwitting and unintentional facilitator? Or something else altogether? I will tell you the facts and leave you to make your own judgments.

Bizarrely to anyone unfamiliar with the ins and outs of French politics, Tixier-Vignancourt, who polled a respectable 5% of the vote on a more or less overtly neo-collaborationist platform, but was eliminated after the first of the two rounds in which France elects her president, encouraged his voters to transfer their votes to his old acquaintance François Mitterand in the second round run-off, which de Gaulle won, but by a much narrower margin than had been expected.

Jean-Marie made many friends amongst Tixier-Vignancourt’s supporters, who included Jean-Pierre Stirbois, later the first FN candidate to be elected to the National Assembly at Dreux in 1983, before dying in a mysterious car crash which might have been the result of driving while very tired and inattentive or might have had a more sinister cause, and Marie-France Charles, later Madame Stirbois, who was to succeed her husband as the only FN deputy in the National Assembly for several years, but later fell out very badly with Le Pen after decades of friendship and comradeship, which, it must be said, was a pattern that repeated itself more than once in le menhir’s life.

After 1965, some of Tixier-Vignancourt’s supporters went on to form l’Ordre Nouveau, an openly neo-fascist organisation that enjoyed a measure of success until the French state banned it in June 1973 after extremely violent clashes between some of its militants and members of a deranged Trotskyite groupuscule.

It must be admitted that from the outset, l’Ordre Nouveau adopted what might be called highly innovative tactics, including, according to none other than Le Pen himself, blowing up the hall in which it was due to hold its first national congress early in 1970 on the eve of the event and quite untruthfully blaming the far left as an unorthodox if effective means of obtaining publicity!

By 1972, however those in l’Ordre Nouveau more interested in real politics than fighting the reds on the streets or dynamiting their own venues (it takes all sorts to make a world!) were already committed to the idea of a new party. Who better to lead it than Jean-Marie, whose courage, energy and gifts as an orator made him the natural choice for the new venture, to be called the Front National?

To be continued . . .