Le Pen, the Counter-Ideologue

The death of Jean-Marie Le Pen on January 7 at the age of 96 evoked from the legacy media the predictable barrage of invectives. Perhaps even surpassing their bile was the torrent of abuse from the head of the leftist antifascist party La France Insoumise, who raged at the attempt to depict the deceased populist as “un grand serviteur de France.”  According to this implacable critic, “Le Pen was nostalgic for the period of French collaboration with Nazi Germany, responsible for torture, a racist and an anti-Semite…. His ideas remain, just as the antifascist struggle continues to be something of burning relevance.”

It would take more than a blog to set the record straight about what Le Pen did or did not say or do according to his detractors. Although his early collaborator in founding the Front National in the 1960s, the Algerian Frenchman Jean-Louis Vixier-Vignancour, had expressed sympathy for the German Occupation government during the Second World War, there’s no evidence that the Breton Le Pen or his parents were rooting for the Third Reich. In fact, from my investigation it seems they were Gaullists.

 The major issue for the French Right when Le Pen broke into politics was the attempt to hold on to Algeria and afterwards the plight of the Algerian French who were either killed by the Algerian rebels once in power or who fled to France. These refugees and their families were a favored constituency of the early Front, although by the1970s Le Pen had begun to appeal to other groups, opponents of an expanding centralized managerial state, traditional French Catholics who lived under an often-unfriendly secular French regime, and those who were reacting to increased Third-World immigration. 

The fact that many of these immigrants were coming from North Africa, and some from an Algeria whence the French had withdrawn after a bloody war, made that issue particularly incendiary. Third-World immigration has also remained down to the present a paramount issue, as over 10 percent of the French population is now foreign born, and most of these newcomers are Muslim. What has been contemptuously characterized as “the great replacement,” the immigration expansionism pushed hard by the French left and even French center, continues to impact French social and economic politics. This transformative immigration policy has produced the same problems in France as in other Western nations: civil unrest and depressed wages among the vulnerable indigenous working class together with fitful attempts by government bureaucrats, public educators, and the mass media to impose multicultural ideology on the ethnic, cultural majority. 

In both After Liberalism and The Strange Death of Marxism, I present Le Pen in terms similar to those of the French right-of-center Les Républicains eulogizing the dead elder statesman: “He was a French patriot who left his mark on his epoch.” Le Pen left his mark on his age and our age far more decisively than the endlessly praised centenarian former president who died last month. The reason Le Pen has received vastly different treatment is that, unlike Jimmy Carter, this outspoken French nationalist never spoke for a long-entrenched establishment. He represented the now surging anti-establishment, fighting globalist elites and their post-Marxist cultural radicalism. What Le Pen landed up giving us, often in a rude, spontaneous way, is a counter-ideology, rooted in both historical identity and democratic self-assertion. The populist wave now enveloping the Western world in varying degrees reveals the fruits of Lepenisme.   

Undoubtedly Le Pen spoke inopportunely, and in 1987 he blew up impulsively at a leftist journalist who was clearly baiting him by describing the Holocaust as a “detail of history.”  This response was foolish, as were other statements that Le Pen made in impromptu interviews, and finally his savvy daughter Marine decided to retire her father and run for French president in his place. The French establishment, which looks even more decrepit than ours, has labored mightily to keep Marine and her Rassemblement National, as the FN now calls itself, from entering the French government. Much to the embarrassment of her enemies, the RN has become the most popular party in France. But the formula seems to have remained the same since Jean-Marie made a fateful decision to go his own way. It was to expand the party of pieds noirs, Algerian refugees, and opponents of centralized government and high taxes (followers of the earlier French populist Maurice Poujade) to incorporate working class concerns and national identity. Various attempts to move in this direction had taken place earlier, by Catholic corporatists and American populist movements. But Le Pen and those who took the same path he did came along at the right historical moment, when global capitalism and the cultural left had come together in an unholy alliance and when the working class had taken a socially conservative turn. It was not the globalist progressive president whom the media are still wildly celebrating, but the scorned French patriot who foreshadowed and gave shape to our populist future. 

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