The Menhir Has Left Us
Part 5

2,344 words

Part 1 begins here

Le Pen’s active engagement in politics continued long after 2002 despite his advancing years, his iron constitution resisting the ravages of time remarkably well, but his party had been weakened by the split with the MNR and for the next ten years was much less successful than before.  Perhaps the FN’s supporters and even its leader felt that after his unexpected success in progressing to the second round of the 2002 presidential election only to meet with a sharp rebuff from 82% of the French electorate, it was difficult to imagine le Menhir taking the FN any further on the arduous road to power.

Nevertheless, Jean-Marie, by then more than three-quarters of a century old, was re-elected to the European Parliament for yet another five year term in 2004, when the list of candidates led by the FN (which would usually include a couple of sympathetic but notionally independent candidates) polled 9.81% across France.

In 2007, he was once again a presidential candidate, polling 3,830,000 votes, some 10.4%, representing a sharp decline on his result in 2002, despite, it should be said, the support of Bruno Mégret and his MNR, who seemed remarkably willing to let bygones be bygones.

The European elections of 2009 were marked by a further fall in support for the FN, which polled a mere 6.34%, losing a third of the voters who had supported it five years before, so that while its leader and three colleagues were re-elected, they had little to celebrate as the party continued to lose support to more mainstream conservatives.

On 9th April 2010, le Menhir, now well into the 82nd year of his long life, announced that he would not be seeking re-election as leader of the FN, nor would he contest the next presidential election in 2012.

As is well-known, the youngest of his three daughters, Marine, succeeded him as party leader in 2011 after a strongly contested election against Jean-Marie’s loyal lieutenant, Bruno Gollnisch, who was very disappointed to see his old chief support his daughter against his dauphin, a decision that le Menhir was to come to regret.

Had either man read so English an author as Oscar Wilde, Bruno Mégret might have told Bruno Gollnisch that in the FN, considerable importance attached to not being Bruno!

The new broom was to sweep very clean. Still strongly supported by her father (now styled président d’honneur or emeritus president of the FN) at this stage, Marine polled an impressive 6,421,426 votes or 17.90% of the total number of votes case at the presidential election of 2012.

Clearly the change of leadership had greatly revived the party’s fortunes, nor was it a flash in the pan, for in the elections to the European Parliament of 2014, Marine led the FN to its greatest triumph yet in terms of the percentage share of the vote, albeit obtained on a low turnout, 4,712,461 votes, or 24.86% of the votes cast and first place overall nationally, a remarkable result, almost quadrupling the party’s share of the vote in five years.

Marine Le Pen, who had enjoyed a successful career as an avocat (the equivalent of a barrister in England or a trial lawyer in the USA), was at first markedly reluctant to become involved in politics (if your abiding memories of childhood included having your house blown up under you in the middle of the night by your father’s political opponents, you might be reluctant too!).

Once engaged in the struggle, she gave it her all and continues so to do. In many ways she resembles her father but she has also drawn some conclusions that are very different from his, one of which was (and is) that in order to take power rather than merely register a huge protest vote hovering around 18% time and again, it was necessary to “dediabolize” the FN, in particular by distancing the party from forays into historical revisionism and avoiding grossly provocative remarks that provoke amusing fits of vaporous pearl clutching from system journalists and politicians, but are more appropriate to the music hall routine of le Menhir’s entertaining Cameroonian friend, Dieudonné M’Balla, than a candidate for the presidency of the French Republic.

These differences of opinion soon set father and daughter on a collision course. Early in April 2015, Jean-Marie repeated his famous observation that the (supposed) German gas chambers of the Second World War were a mere detail of history, going on a few days later to question whether Marshal Pétain was a traitor to France.

Whatever one might think about the merits of these propositions, their author must have known that they would enrage his youngest daughter, since they were manifestly irreconcilable with her strategy of winning over a broader coalition of voters.

Marine quickly acted against her own father, requesting the FN’s political bureau to suspend him from membership on 4th May 2015, which it did, before expelling him after a tempestuous disciplinary hearing on 20^th August 2015. That must have been a stormy affair indeed, though Marine herself did not attend, lest she should be accused of being both prosecutor and one of the judges. Her principal adviser of that period Florian Philippot, who had agitated for her father’s expulsion, also stayed away for the same reason.

Four members of FN’s political bureau of twenty voted against the decision to expel. The “gang of four” consisted of Marie-Christine Arnautu, a Member of the European Parliament and old friend and party comrade of Jean-Marie’s, to whom he had shown much kindness long before, when she was in strained economic circumstances, his faithful sometime second-in-command, Bruno Gollnisch (who must have allowed himself a wry smile at having to defend his old friend against his friend’s daughter, whose leadership campaign le menhir had supported), Jean-Marie’s favourite and most gifted grandchild, Marine’s niece, Marion Maréchal (of whom more shortly: her evident abilities and status as family favourite made her by far the most dangerous opponent of her aunt amongst the four) but also, quite astonishingly given the domestic scene that must have followed that very evening, Marine’s long-term partner, Louis Alliot! Perhaps surprisingly, and to the credit of them both, their relationship endured a further five years after that eventful day.

Never one to accept defeat, le Menhir began court proceedings seeking to have his expulsion from the party that he had founded set aside, which had the curious though perhaps Solomonic outcome both at first instance and on appeal that the judges found that he had been lawfully expelled as a mere member, but since he had a special status as président d’honneur, even though constitutionally expelled, he had been unlawfully excluded from participating in meetings of the party’s political bureau (which had by a large majority expelled him!).

Marine refused to comply with an order that she should allow her father to attend meetings of the political bureau, whereupon the Court of Appeal at Versailles awarded him 25,000 Euros (about £20,000 or $30,000) as damages on 9th February 2018.  The FN changed its constitution at a special general meeting a month later, to regularise the position by removing him as président d’honneur.

Several elected representatives of the FN either resigned at once following Jean-Marie’s expulsion, or decided not to seek re-election to public office or within the party, notably including Marion Maréchal, who bitterly criticised her aunt’s dilution of long-standing policies and (more painfully to her aunt than any expression of political differences) Marine’s intellectual qualifications to be her country’s head of state.

While remaining a MEP until 2019, Jean-Marie now rapidly approaching his ninetieth birthday, set about his last great labour, writing his memoirs, which appeared in two volumes, the first Fils de la Nation (Son of the Nation), appearing on 1st March 2018 with marked success. A print run of 50,000 copies soon sold out, as did a second run of 100,000 copies.

The second volume, Tribun de la Nation (Tribune of the Nation), appeared eighteen months later in October 2019. For reasons that are unclear, it did not enjoy the same success as the first. Notably, however, Jean-Marie gave his own judgment on Marine in volume two:

She has some of the qualities needed to be involved in politics: she is brave, energetic and a witty debater. But she lacks self-confidence, which explains her faults. She is dictatorial. She will not be contradicted. I was the only one who would stand up to her in her new model FN, so she expelled me.

He also criticised Marine for adopting much more left wing economic policies[1] than he had done and “striving obsessively to dediabolise the party just as the devil is becoming popular”. In contrast, his granddaughter, Marion Maréchal, is simply described as “a woman of exceptional brilliance”.

There are therefore no prizes on offer for guessing which of the two was invited to Jean-Marie’s ninetieth birthday party, where some three hundred friends, comrades and family members joined him to celebrate one of the most extraordinary lives of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Another welcome guest was the controversial journalist and writer, Eric Zemmour, who was to contest the 2022 French presidential election against Marine, but strongly supported by Marion Maréchal and more or less openly endorsed by le Menhir himself.

Yet it was Marine, not “Z”, whose candidacy had initially sparked much excitement and enthusiasm, who was to go forward to the second round, not least because her “opening to the left” won over millions of working class voters who felt intuitively and quite correctly that Marine was sincerely committed to a combination of immigration control and lavish state support for the economically disadvantaged, unlike the odious Rothschild’s banker, Emmanuel Macron, but also, it must be said, unlike her niece and Eric Zemmour, who are both enchanted by the dynamism of the free market, as, in no small measure, was le menhir himself, so both points of view are worthy of consideration.

Le menhir pulled no punches at his ninetieth. No longer constrained by any party political responsibilities, he chose as his own epitaph a quotation from the famous poet, novellist, journalist and collaborator with the Germans, Robert Brasillach, sometime editor of Je suis partout, who was executed by firing squad on 6th February 1945 for the “crime” of writing articles supporting the German war effort on the Eastern Front.

It must have been an extraordinary thing to hear Jean-Marie, contemplating his death, reading the lines that Brasillach wrote when waiting to be executed:

We marched with our heads held high and our hands were clean. We have nothing with which to reproach ourselves in that respect. The past was so beautiful that, looking back on it, we should not bewail our fate.

Jean-Marie’s health declined rapidly after a heart attack early in 2023. His mental faculties were also in decline by this stage. Ultimately, his three daughters applied jointly to have a guardianship order made, which had the no doubt intended advantage of putting a stay on criminal proceedings then pending against him for abuse of EU funds.

On 3rd July 2024, the Public Prosecutor’s office in Paris announced that his name had been struck from the indictment as he was unable to instruct his legal advisers or to offer a defence by reason of mental incapacity.

These proceedings however continue against several serving and former FN/RN MEPs, the accused including both Marine and her father’s old loyalist, Marie-Christine Arnautu, who has already been convicted and sentenced to eighteen months’ imprisonment, twelve however suspended. The Court’s verdict in Marine’s case is expected on 31st March.

It should be emphasised that none of the accused are said to have acted for personal advantage or to have received one centime of EU funds for their own gain. What they are alleged to have done is to have appointed party members to positions on their personal staffs at the EU parliament, which positions were in reality well-paid sinecures with minimal or no duties, while the holders of the sinecures in reality worked full time as agitators for the RN. Such behaviour may have involved serious breaches of the eleventh commandment. Tsk, tsk. But the consequences of conviction are very serious, including not only the risk of custodial sentences, but also disqualification from standing for public office.

Time in the end grinds down even the hardest granite. Le Menhir died in a nursing home on 7th January 2025, by then fully reconciled with the Catholic Church, with which his relationship had not always been easy, notably because his first wife and the mother of his children, Pierrette Lalanne, was a divorcée, so that they had a register office wedding.

Jean-Marie had told a sympathetic journalist on Le Figaro (France’s principal conservative daily, which always treated him respectfully) that he had three last wishes. He hoped to die surrounded by his family and without suffering too much pain. The second wish was granted, the first, not so much. His family life had been tempestuous, but happily he was largely reconciled with Marine by the time of his death, however she was far away when he died, campaigning in one of France’s remaining colonial possessions and only learned of her father’s death from a journalist at the airport on returning home. As an old political combatant, he would not have been put out by that.

Le Menhir’s third wish was to be laid to rest in the family mausoleum in Trinité-sur-Mer, beside his parents, which was fulfilled, so that his life came full circle and he returned very appropriately for a man of his beliefs to his native soil, mourned by his two often fractious political heiresses Marine and Marion (“Didn’t the girls do well!”, he once said). He has left us, but his blood line runs on in the political life of his country and his memory will endure for so long as national France endures and so, I hope, for ever.

Notes

[1]  British though not perhaps American readers will be surprised to learn that in France where (unlike England) a large section of the bourgeoisie is for complicated historical reasons relatively socially illiberal and open to nationalist arguments, the middle class element of the right’s support base is more hard line on race and immigration than the working class element.