THROUGH five successive French elections Jean-Marie Le Pen has attempted to become the president of the Republic, once even making it to the decisive second round in 2002 against Jacques Chirac who finally beat him.

Today his critics derive a lot of satisfaction, apparently not to Le Pen’s own displeasure, in calling him the ‘Devil of the Republic’. But his struggles and his career covering half a century in French politics certainly merit a little more attention than a simple, four-word vituperation.

Le Pen, a former army officer and Dien Bien Phu war veteran who also participated in the Algerian war in 1957, formed his National Front party in 1972. Since then he has never been out of the media’s attention.

When the National Front’s leadership was taken over in 2011 by his daughter Marine, it was generally assumed that daddy Le Pen would gradually recede into the background; but to the surprise of everyone he continues to be at the centre of successive and often violent controversies because of his seething declarations against people and ideas he doesn’t approve of.

Jean-Marie Le Pen has always preferred to reject the pensée unique and his tendency to blurt out what is on his mind dates back to his early days in politics when in 1965 he made a most shocking comparison between a national hero and a man who was widely considered to be a villain because of his cooperation with the German army during World War II.

He had said: “It was a lot easier for Gen De Gaulle sitting in London to resist the Nazis than for Marshall Pétain who was facing them in his own country.”

Le Pen was lambasted by political leaders of all hues on his description of the holocaust as follows: “If you take a book of a thousand pages on the Second World War in which 50 million people were killed, the concentration camps occupy only two pages and the gas chambers no more than 10 lines. It’s just a historical detail and no more.”

Le Pen’s bitterly denounced provocations often come from his penchant for making a play of words with other people’s names. When in 1988 Michel Durafour, a Socialist politician of Jewish origin, accused him of anti-Semitism Le Pen qualified Durafour as crématoire. In French four means an oven and crématoire refers to mass incinerations of human bodies by the Nazis.

More recently, during a session of the European Parliament of which Le Pen is a member since 2004, he addressed the Green Party leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit as le con bandit that can roughly be translated as ‘the stupid robber’.

But last week the person most embarrassed by Le Pen’s latest provocation was none else than his own daughter Marine, who led a sizeable majority in May’s European Parliament elections by creating a softer image of the National Front. Reacting to his criticism by pop singer Patrick Bruel, Le Pen had retorted, “We shall soon have to dump him into the furnace.” Once again a pun on the French word bruler which means ‘to burn’.

Valérie Igounet, historian and author of Portrait of a Negativist that had appeared in 2012, says there is nothing abrupt in Le Pen’s provocations: “No matter how flabbergasting they may sound, his declarations are always coolly calculated in advance. He is merely pushing the National Front into a political system that he creates an illusion of trying to destroy. But that is only his stratagem.”

Many of his opponents could not help giving credit to Le Pen for his audacity when he visited Baghdad to meet Saddam Hussein prior to the American invasion. On return he said: “It is too simplistic calling Saddam a dictator and a tyrant. Only his authoritarianism is allowing different communities, including Christians and Jews, to continue living in peace and harmony. If we remove him now, Iraq will be a disastrous mess for a long time to come.”

However, this time the ‘furnace’ provocation has drawn acrimonious criticism not only from Le Pen’s known opponents but also from many of the National Front leaders; his daughter Marine qualified it as a ‘political mistake’.

Le Pen who remains the Honorary President for Life of the party snappily hit back: “The real political mistake is being made by Marine herself who is trying to turn the nonconformist National Front that I had created into a conformist, mainstream party”.

Raphael Dumas, journalist and political analyst, says: “No doubt Jean-Marie Le Pen is the Devil of the Republic; but he cannot be imagined, at age 86, to have any ambitions for power. He is an earnest devil and it is important not to forget that!”

— The writer is a journalist based in Paris.

ZafMasud@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, June 22nd, 2014