The National Front has been rooted in French political life for thirty years now. However, behind the figure of its historic leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the party has undergone a winding evolution.
Since the 1980s, the National Front has had a continuous presence in the political field. How can we explain the maintenance, for thirty years and at a high electoral level, of a party which professes to reject the political game en bloc? ? How can this stability be combined with the upheavals in French society over the same period? ?
It is these thorny questions that Valérie Igounet tackles as a historian, as it is true that the F.N. can no longer be considered as a temporary eruption of French political life. The author of the book is a specialist in Holocaust denial. It offers a study based both on in-depth interviews with members (current or former) of the F.N.publications of the party or organizations “ friends », as well as often unpublished archives. The plan is chronological, while highlighting the pivotal dates of the movement (1972, 1983, 1999, 2010) and the detailed portraits of executives.
History of an ascent
If the F.N. seems inseparable from Jean-Marie Le Pen, or even from the Le Pen family, he is not the inspiration. At the end of the 1960s, the far right suffered divisions and failures (Vichy, Poujadism, French Algeria). One group stands out: New order », founded after the ban on “ West » in 1968. Alain Robert, its leader, asked Jean-Marie Le Pen to participate in the project of a “ National Front for French Unity “.
Conflict quickly broke out: in 1972, the activist group was dissolved. Le Pen is trying to marginalize its members, who constitute the backbone of the new party. In 1973, it was the first in a series of splits which marked the history of F.N. : the former members of the New Order founded the Party of New Forces (NFPborn in 1974). A paradoxical period followed for the F.N.until 1983: electoral marginality did not prevent the structuring of the party, the original desire to merge the extreme right and the creation of an initial pool of executives.
With the sulphurous François Duprat (assassinated in 1978), nationalist-revolutionary and negationist, the question of immigration became, at the end of the decade, the programmatic and ideological pivot of the F.N.. In 1976, the Le Pen family survived an attack on their Paris home, while the party leader inherited a fortune that provided him with the means for a full-time political career.
When the left came to power, the F.N. is low (impossibility for Jean-Marie Le Pen to run in the 1981 presidential election, 150 members up to date with contributions in 1982). However, this decade marks the emergence of the party. 1983 was a turning point: Jean-Marie Le Pen was invited to the show “ The Hour of Truth », Jean-Pierre Stirbois becomes deputy mayor of the right-wing majority in Dreux. Successes followed one another: European elections in 1984, legislative elections in 1986. In a climate of radicalization of the right, young executives of the RPR and theUDFaround senior civil servants Bruno Mégret, Yvan Blot and Jean-Yves Le Gallou, shifted towards F.N.which offers dazzling career opportunities (p. 173).
The years 1986-1988 saw a double rupture, according to Valérie Igounet, who agrees on this point with the documentary The Devil of the Republicbroadcast on France 3 on November 30, 2011. While the right returns to power, the F.N. chose not to join it, causing the departure of the most moderate from the party. In 1987, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s declaration describing the gas chambers as “ point of detail » of the Second World War made the leader, then the F.N. all in all, an unavoidable actor in the political field (p. 188-195). It is to break the pace of ascent, the temptations of alliance, even the political hopes of its leader. His subsequent provocations perpetuate this repulsion.
Breakups and setbacks
With the death of Jean-Pierre Stirbois in 1988, Bruno Mégret, who had become general delegate, and his team took control of the device. Their strategy, carried out from 1988 to 1999, included three pillars: the professionalization of the party, the development of a doctrine (including the “ national preference “) and the investment of the social field. The Mégretist practice is summarized in a document advocating the semantic replacement of “ bougnoules at the sea ” by “ organize the return home of immigrants from the Third World » (p. 230).
This mixture of strategy and radicalism aims to create an alliance with the moderate rights. The municipal elections of 1995 and the regional elections of 1998 seem to come close to this wish. However, this wait, for those who are quick to call the “ megretists », comes up against a major obstacle: Jean-Marie Le Pen, who is satisfied with a protest role.
The rupture, progressive from 1995, broke out in 1999. Valérie Igounet shows that the date opens a fairly homogeneous period in the history of F.N. until 2010, that of a party crippled by difficulties. The hemorrhage is particularly severe among executives, most of whom join the National Republican Movement (MNR) by Bruno Mégret, which however fails to compete with F.N.. From this point of view, the work reveals that the result in the 2002 presidential election is the tree that hides the forest of the problems of the F.N.. To the aging of Jean-Marie Le Pen and the investment of the apparatus by the most radical branches of the extreme right (until then kept on the fringes) were added the electoral difficulties from 2002, then financial.
From 2008 to 2010, the F.N. is experiencing a little-known, but fundamental, crisis in the context of the struggle for power between the two vice-presidents appointed in 2007, Bruno Gollnisch and Marine Le Pen. The victory of the leader’s daughter for the presidency of the party in 2011 marks a new stage, with the departure of several historic executives. Marine Le Pen’s method is also reminiscent of certain strategic wishes of the Mégretists twenty years earlier.
An organization not so “ out of system »
The work highlights several tensions and factors that run through the complex history of F.N. and calls into question the external image that has been built or has been built around this party. Three axes can be briefly mentioned, from the individual to the global: the leader, the party, their interactions with the political system.
On the one hand, paradoxically, Jean-Marie Le Pen appears, within the ultra far right, to be rather moderate. Anti-Semitic, racist and colonialist, he is also a long-time elected notable, belonging to an extreme right that is both protesting and legalist, who prefers the ballot box to street fights – without disdaining the latter on occasion. This relative moderation is its most formidable strategic weapon: it has enabled the feat of making the entire range of French extreme right groups coexist in the same structure.
On the other hand, the ideological plasticity of the organization itself is one of its most remarkable aspects, as shown by the transition from Atlanticism to anti-Americanism. This state of affairs is the result of little-known and recurring tensions between frontists, which began with the clashes between the nationalist-revolutionaries of François Duprat and the solidarists of Jean-Pierre Stirbois at the end of the 1970s. They have not stopped since, the subjects of confrontation having simply changed. The plasticity of ideas has a territorial basis. THE F.N. former industrial regions of the North-East sometimes use the term left. That of the South is above all defined by the heritage of the militants of French Algeria and a more bourgeois extreme right.
Finally, the F.N. and the political system maintain ambivalent relationships. The party has intermittently attempted rapprochement with the other rights. These approaches came up against the double obstacle of Gaullism (the rejection of which has long been the common basis of the Frontists) and the fluctuations of the F.N.. For their part, certain executives of the RPR and theUDF (like Charles Pasqua in 1988) did not despair of a grand alliance.
For their part, would some of the left-wing elites have seen in the F.N. a tool for dividing lines ? A terrible sentence from Pierre Bérégovoy indicates that this idea at least existed when the party was beginning to take off: “ We have every interest in pushing the National Front, it makes the right ineligible. The stronger he is, the more unbeatable we are. This is the historic opportunity of the socialists » (p. 127).
THE F.N.far from being just a troublemaker in political life, has become a routine part of it. It is both the strongest conclusion of a fascinating work and the most striking result of the thirty years following the party’s breakthrough in Dreux.