Why mourn a torturer? 7 January 2025 marked the day the life of Jean-Marie Le Pen—co-founder and leader up to 2011 of France’s far-right Front National (FN) party—came to a close at 96. Le Pen overcame attachment to a litany of violent crimes over his many years to become a hugely influential figure in French politics. He ran for president five times, coming runner-up in 2002, and drove a ‘lepénisation’ of political thought, through which he partially legitimised Euroscepticism and hardcore xenophobia.

 

Upon his death, his daughter Marine—parliamentary leader of the now-named Rassemblement National (RN), or National Rally—posted a stoic, largely unemotional tribute on Twitter (or X, if you want to be obtuse). She signed it off by wishing her “warrior” father “fair winds and following seas,” a fittingly archaic conclusion to a man’s life dedicated in large part to bringing a suspicion of modernity to the political fore.

 

Commenters had a range of responses to this tweet. @olivier_zor offered Le Pen Jr., referring to her perhaps prematurely as “Madame La Présidente”, “all my condolences.” @mika0557B, on the other hand, had no sympathy for Marine at all. In Mika’s eyes, she—reviled by the left for making indiscreet overtures to autocrats and her hardline stances on migration, climate and the EU—had lost her father’s radical edge. She had “left him behind and betrayed [his] values,” making her nothing more than a “traitor.” Perhaps Mika is making an allusion to Marine’s efforts to give her party at least a more palatable appearance to groups other than racists, her father’s demographic of choice, including but not limited to making its name a little less militarist.

 

It was not just on the denizens of Elon Musk’s increasingly hard-to-stomach social media platform that Jean-Marie left an impact. The Élysée (presidential palace) released a communiqué labelling Le Pen a “historic figure” (as in one who will be remembered by history, not necessarily positively) for bringing far-right politics onto the national stage. Meanwhile, François Bayrou, the newly-appointed Prime Minister of France, told Reuters that “we knew, by fighting him, what a fighter he was.”

 

An unerringly accurate statement, as it turns out, but perhaps not as Bayrou intended. Le Pen was literally a fighter. He participated in the so-called ‘Savage War of Peace’, fought between French colonial forces and Algerian nationalists, which culminated in 1962 in the country’s independence. In 1957, as a volunteer soldier, Le Pen—it is now established—was involved in multiple episodes of torture and extra-judicial killing.

 

In my eyes, this begs the question: how did France, a key cog in the free world, whose rallying cry of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité appears to clash so strongly with Le Pen’s values and actions, allow him to establish such a foothold in politics? This was a man who admitted to acts of torture, who flirted with Holocaust denial on numerous occasions, who was suspended from the European Parliament in 2000 for assaulting a Socialist parliamentary candidate, and who associated with terrorists and Nazi collaborators. Yet the party in whose development he played a greater role than anyone else now appears poised to seize the presidency in the next election (to be held in two years’ time), having got progressively closer to victory in the last two. As right-wing populism sweeps across the democratic world, Le Pen’s is a story we must seek to understand better, rather than leaving it behind in the annals of history.

 

To begin to find an answer to this question, we must return to 1956. Jean-Marie Le Pen, a wide-eyed, twenty-eight-year-old member of the French Fourth Republic’s Chamber of Deputies, steps off a boat carrying other Foreign Legionnaires onto the shores of sun-soaked Algiers. Dominating the city is the Kasbah, the seemingly impenetrable (to the French) citadel that has become the epicentre of an anti-colonial insurgency. It is here that Le Pen—determined to ‘preserve this part of France”—will attempt to subdue the rebellion. His approach for doing this would now be seen as unorthodox, to say the least.

 

As reported in the Guardian and Le Monde, Le Pen led or took part in the torturing of Algerian independence-seekers multiple times. Ghaniya Merouane recounted how he “started the torture” of her father and brother, “kicking [her] father with the sole of his boot” until he was “covered in blood.” After being led from their cells in detention facility Fort L’Empereur a few weeks later, they were never seen again. Abdelbaker Ammour gave a similar eyewitness account, describing how “Le Pen sat on me and held the cloth [to my mouth] while another person poured water. I can hear him shouting, ‘Get on with it, don’t stop’.”

 

I find the most chilling story from Le Pen’s time in the Kasbah to be that of Ahmed Moulay. The night of 2-3 March 1957, Moulay was waterboarded and given electric shocks, before being executed in front of his wife and six children. The following morning, Mohamed—one of Ahmed’s sons, then just twelve years of age—discovered a dagger inscribed with the name ‘JM Le Pen’.

 

This dagger has since been identified as a Hitler Youth knife, initially manufactured as a recruitment accessory by the Third Reich—yet another ugly element to add to an already grim tale. Le Pen’s engagement with Nazism did not end there, either; in 1987, he dismissed the Holocaust’s gas chambers as nothing but a “side note in the history of the Second World War,” and not a “proven truth that everyone must believe in.”

 

It is, to me, a great injustice that Le Pen never suffered for these utterly unforgivable crimes, either legally or in his political career. Up to 2000, he successfully sued all who accused him of torture in Algeria, a feat made all the more remarkable by the fact that in both 1957 and 1962 he merrily confessed to torturing Algerian independence fighters. I am unsure if I should see this as a credit to Le Pen’s lawyers or a condemnation of the French legal system, but I would imagine both were indispensable to such a judicial ignominy.

 

What these episodes reveal, apart from Le Pen’s capacity for violence, is the reverence he held for France’s colonial power. But he was not alone in holding these views. Numerous right-wing factions—military officers’ groups, political parties and even terrorist cells—fed off France’s unfolding colonial crises in the mid-twentieth century, losing territories such as Indochina (present-day Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam) in 1954 and Algeria in 1962. And each of them came together in 1972 to form the FN, with Le Pen at its head. Among his dubious new colleagues were Holocaust denier François Duprat and former SS soldier Pierre Bousquet, who took up the mantle of being the party’s first treasurer.

 

Why should we care about this matter today, though? After all, Le Pen achieved what he achieved in spite of his myriad crimes in Algeria. I believe that the answer lies in the imperial nostalgia of the current RN.

 

By the time Le Pen had become an electoral liability in 2011, he was of a sufficiently old age that his more dynamic daughter could quietly shuffle him off the national stage and mostly shed his personal baggage. Torture of Algerians—finally—had become unpopular in the 2010s, and Jean-Marie had served his purpose. Nevertheless, he and his twentieth-century associates’ empire-informed, French-exceptionalist views on Algeria and multiculturalism continue to underpin significant portions of the RN’s ideology. Thus, Marine’s political astuteness (a phrase I am not filled with satisfaction to write) allowed her party to retain her father’s substance while losing his problematic reputation.

 

The RN still insists on antagonising Algeria, for one. A recent petition called for the “immediate suspension of visas for Algerian expats” in France, as well as ceasing developmental aid to the country and repealing the 1968 accords that gave each nation’s workers privileged access to the other’s job and education markets. This was in response to the state not following up on ten thousand deportation notices for undocumented migrants each year; what the RN called the “Algerian humiliation” (although not all of those notices are for Algerian migrants). In using Algeria as a bogeyman for the wider political question of immigration, the RN has attempted to exacerbate memories of French imperial collapse in the collective national psyche to its advantage.

 

Conveniently, though, the RN has remained far more taciturn when asked to denounce (often white-majority) autocratic states such as Russia, whose government endorsed Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella’s anti-European, isolationist platform just days before the second round of legislative elections in 2024.

 

More broadly, imperial-era stances on multiculturalism continue to prevail in the RN and other right-wing parties. Pierre Poujade, an unabashed antisemite under whose movement Jean-Marie was first elected deputy in 1956, once said of France’s Jewish population, “You are in France… have you integrated with the French people? No… you are the racist, as you didn’t want to integrate. You came here to profit off the French people, off all that they have done for you, off their generosity… and you have stayed over there, in your little group.”

 

While perhaps more direct than politicians would be nowadays, I don’t imagine you will find much difficulty in observing parallels between Poujade’s contention of Jewish reverse-racism and 2022 presidential candidate Éric Zemmour’s inversion of France’s imperial relationship with the Maghreb. Talking about his proposed policy to force all French children to be given ‘French’ names, Zemmour argued that “to call your child Mohammed” was to “colonise France.”

 

It is to the modest credit of British democracy that, for all the issues surrounding First Past The Post as an electoral system, and for all the reprehensible political figures our country has produced, it has not let anyone in the last few decades with anything remotely like Le Pen’s history of brutality reach the political heights he did in France. Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists never won a seat in the Commons, and Nigel Farage’s parties—seen as Britain’s ideological answer to the FN—have never been able to surpass five. That being said, with the winds of change now seemingly blowing in favour of Tommy Robinson following Elon Musk’s unwelcome intervention into our politics earlier this year, it is not unfeasible that the conservative mainstream might begin to accept those with similarly unsavoury pasts.

 

In the context of the rampant success of right-wing populism across the Americas and Europe, it appears that Le Pen is triumphing, even from his grave. Western liberals are beginning to force themselves to confront the prospect that Labour’s victory in the 2024 general election might be their last one for many years. With this in mind, it is imperative that Le Pen is remembered how he should be: a man whose resurrection of imperial nostalgia and xenophobia led to dangerous simplification of political discourse over numerous now-divisive issues, most obviously migration. His shifting of France’s Overton Window (the realm of acceptable political discourse) rightwards has duly allowed his daughter—far more electorally successful in recent years than he ever was—to reap the benefits to the tune of now being the largest single party in the Assemblée Nationale (French parliament).

 

Beyond that, he can justly be labelled a perpetrator of multiple heinous crimes on an individual level, having at the very least watched over the torture and murder of many Algerian nationalists in 1957. Without a doubt, modern-day evaluations of Le Pen’s legacy should bear them in mind—mine certainly does! In this light, Marine Le Pen’s commemoration of her father as a “warrior” takes on a more sinister and insidious side. It furthermore exposes the cosmic unfairness that she has been afforded the opportunity to celebrate her father’s life—an opportunity of which Mohamed Moulay and Ghaniya Merouane were brutally deprived.∎

 

Words by Tom Mcfarlane. Image courtesy of Semnoz via Wikimedia Commons.