The National Front (FN) is 50 years old. It was founded on October 10 1972 and has courted controversy since, in the media and political salons. But on close inspection we can see that just as their opponents as much as their hagiographers, have created a picture that is far from reality, based as it is on many myths.

The National Front for critics and supporters is a fascist or crypto-fascist formation on the far-right, rubbing shoulders with Nazism. The last creation from the fertile creative pen of Berthold Brecht’s ‘The Career of Arturo Ui’ is the latest incarnation of the entrance of moral evil into politics.

For the hagiographers, the FN is the comic strip village of Asterix as the only one that resists waves of outside invaders. It’s a patriotic levée en masse, the last bastion of French civilisation, the nation’s only hope, “the national family” beyond which are only traitors and enemies.

Sentenced for historical rectitude

Let us take for example the first myth in line, not very subtle either to be sure, and often used as a cudgel rather than the fruit of political analysis, namely the accusation of Nazism. “ ‘F’ like fascists , ‘N’ like Nazis” was the slogan used for years, chanted at every anti-fascist demonstration in particular during the time that FN’s president was Jean-Marie le Pen. The fast that with his personality and oratorical talent, and his propensity for the controversial flourish, became the best victim of Reductio ad Hitlerum. The Hitler moustache is also scrawled on posters of his daughter and successor, Marine.

For the majority of his opponents it’s just a simple insult, and not about any factual accusation of Nazism, rhetorically overused anyway. The party became established 25 years after the war, just after May 1968. This brought new problems and questions. The slate was cleared of its historical issues.

The National Front has not and never has had in its programme any such historical relations. It was not a party nostalgic for the Third Reich, Vichy collaboration or French-Algerian enthusiasm. Its closeness to those events however made it close to the subject. Those publicists who want to show that it has Nazi roots use the same arguments, especially when used by its founders.

  It cannot be denied and no one has anyway, that the first founders in the 1970s  were indeed such individuals such as Pierre Bousquet a former soldier in the French Waffen-SS Division Charlemagne, journalist François Brigneau, a wartime collaborationist militiaman.  There were also former members of the Resistance, Serge Jeanneret, Jean-Maurice Demrarquet or Roger Holeindre. Roland Birgy was awarded  a ‘Righteous among Nations’ citation and Georges Bidault a former prime minister in the Fourth Republic was a close co-operator of Charles de Gaulle, who left the Gaullist right  because of the Algerian war policy. It’s worthwhile remembering that on the list in the 1999 European elections was a certain Charles de Gaulle, the general’s grandson. On the other hand it’s possible to make a similar list  for parties in the 1970s for almost each party. We can start with François Mitterand, a civil servant responsible for Allied POWs in the Vichy government, who was awarded by Marshal Phillipe Pétain for his personal service.

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    When Jean-Marie Le Pen opinionated controversially on the 1939-45 war, for which he was condemned by the French courts, they were controversial chiefly for his political opponents, and from the younger generation. When in 2005 he stated “the German occupation in France was not particularly inhuman” it was not a “apology for crimes against humanity” as the courts wanted. They sentenced him to three month’s imprisonment and a EUR 10,000 fine. It was a simple description of historical reality. Every historian can objectively compare the occupation on the Seine with that on the Vistula, and can confirm this too. 

Activists and  sympathisers could not prevent the president from taking the podium on this matter, as each comment could be turned against him. His character, self-confidence and his penchant for media disasters often took centre stage above political calculations. It did not translate into the ‘4.9 percent protocol,’  but served to make the FN as a whipping boy. This protocol as in the case of the Polish politician Janusz Korwin-Mikke who  in the presidential and parliamentary elections obtained 5.2 percent vote and did not win a seat.

  After  Marine Le Pen took over the reins of the party it appeared that the demonisation through ‘Hitlerisation’  started to wane. During one of her first interviews she told a provocative journalist “What are you talking about, I was born in 1968.”

  He had it all- youth, talent, authority etc.

When it comes to the actual establishment of the group, it is portrayed as the sole work of Le Pen. But if you follow the history of the party itself it would be absurd to deny this  ‘Menhir’ style , a remarkable personality, superb orator and a man of the people. His style, that of a  politician ruling with an iron hand was known to all who saw him up close. If the French could know the iron curtain quip they would say “I say Party, I think Lenin”. This would suit the FN. That the FN was Jean-Marie, you cannot deny, but it was not always the case.

The National Front was called into being in 1972 as an electoral caucus embracing the extra parliamentary right, nationalist and centre-right Gaullists that were disenchanted with the general for French Algerian policy. The spiritus movens of the enterprise was a small, but very energetic radical movement the Ordre Nouveau, the New Order, which formulated the electoral manifesto and strategy for the parliamentary elections of 1973. It lacked one thing an uncontroversial and symbolic leader who was above division. The organisers wanted Doninique Venner, who enjoyed  a level of authority in the nationalist right as an activist and intellectual. But he decided to withdraw from active politics.

  Jean-Marie Le Pen was thus the second choice. He was the youngest of the 1956 Poujadistes (a name taken  from Pierre Poujade, leader of a party of small businessmen and who gained 56 seats in the National Assembly). Le Pen was later elected as an independent, who took leave to fight as a NCO in Algeria. He had it all- youth, talent authority etc. Between 1963 and 1966 he made himself known as the leader of Jean-Louis Tixier-Vigancour, lawyer and right-wing individual who had failed in a presidential election bid.

Le Pen was on a long holiday from politics when the National Front was set up. He worked as a record producer in the meantime. In November 1972, he found himself at the head of the new party as a figurehead initially. But in the spring of 1973 he was the sole captain of the ship. The interior ministry dissolved the Ordre Nouveau. Also the Trotskyist Revolutionary League had its political wings clipped and this left the National Front as the sole nationalist right structure. Le Pen started to stamp his authority from that moment on.

  This did not mean that the FN was an organisational or intellectual monolith. It’s another myth, a figment of the imagination of opponents who think that a group accused of being  totalitarian must itself be totalitarian. This is repeated by supporters of the FN who wish to look for a semblance of family solidarity among its higher political ideals.

  Neither the party nor programme was monolithic. The FN was uncommonly diverse right from the start. It was a form of levée en masse, rallying round the intellectual most common denominator. This had been unveiled in 1973 and has changed little since. This consisted of a programme of proportional representation to parliament, immigration controls, a professional army (realised by President Jacques Chirac in 1997), trade barriers and the support for small businesses and the middle class (echoes of the Poujadism for the young Le Pen). There Was also support for the family, and the de-politicisation of the civil service and education. There was no mention as yet of sovereignty or a united Europe.

  In other matters, notably economic, the party manifesto swerved from a Reaganite liberalism to protectionism, from Atlanticism to isolationism depending on who took charge of this particular policy. Other issues were deliberately left on the back burner only to fall off the agenda some time later. This example form the 1980s, when French posters  hung on wall calling for the death penalty in 1981, something that had been repealed and today is an unfashionable cause. The FN could not even bring itself to take up the matter of homosexual marriage as part of the reform of social policy in 2010.

Even if the FN had coalesced somewhat from 1972 and through centralisation from a loose confederation it had burgeoned into professional political party; it remained in the intellectual sphere  a many-faceted phenomenon. There were traditional Catholics and neo-pagans, ordinary patriots and workers, and bourgeois too. The term “national family” made considerable traction; every member of the member kept their identity but acted in unison. Before Marine Le Pen’s transformation there was some internal juggling for priorities but this today has taken second stage.

  A series of splits and demonisation

A multi-current approach was bound to lead to divisions and disagreements. The whole history of the FN from its inception to Jean-Marie Le Pen taking over  to today is one series of splits. They left he FN to return to it eventually- activists, those who had high positions, sometimes alone other times in small groupings of the faithful. There are few veterans of those times in today’s FN. In 2018, the FN changed its name to RN, Rassemblement Nationale the National Rally). The majority disappeared into history and withdrew from politics. Who can remember those exotic names- The Party of New Strength, New Space Committees or the Movement for Labour and Country? But the party of Le Pen survived and you cannot deny that it endured.

The coup mounted by Bruno Mégret in 1999 was undoubtedly the biggest threat to the formation and the president, who called him a putschist; Mégret the then FN number two with aspirations to being the ‘Dauphin’. He took over half the regional, EU and mayors offices and higher grade administrators. He also got the support of the majority of party intellectuals and youth activists. Le Pen was there for the taking, with a handful of loyalists. But the supporters and electors did not disappoint.

  Rebuilding his electoral position took some time, but Mégret shortly left politics and returned to a safe job in the civil service. Le Pen, three years later entered the second round of presidential elections to go up against Jacques Chirac. This, the man who gained 0.74 percent of the votes in 1974, in 1981 could not even start for lack of required signatures from the electorate.

The second round would go into the history and the text books. There were huge anti-fascist demonstrations, some spontaneous others orchestrated by the political classes.  The presence of young people was noteworthy and it was a phenomenon unseen hitherto on such a scale. For two weeks this festival of hypertrophic morality, to use sociologist Arnold Gehlen’s terms, was the true apogee of the demonisation of the FN.

Bu the demonisation of the FN that acknowledged the party’s nature as being different from all others and with whom one shouldn’t  enter into alliances for moral reasons was not  totally unanimous. There was no need for this in the 1970s.The FN received only a few percent of the votes cast, nearer to  one percent.  In 1980 it still had only 270 members. In the early 1980s it started to reach, on a local level, results of a few dozen percent, it began to be seen as a a party, extreme and controversial to be sure, but not yet deserving of moral opprobrium and exclusion. 

In 1986, President François Mitterand even recognised the FN as a useful tool to limit the influence of the classical centre-right. The introduction of the system of proportional representation allowed the nationalists to garner 35 seats. In a Machiavellian turn, this would allow the weakening of the Gaullist position. But the French political classes returned to the one-person one-vote system in two rounds. This meant that a party with 15, 20 or even 25 percent on a national scale was deprived of appropriate representation in parliament for the next 30 years.

  The existence of a cordon sanitaire from the very beginning is also largely a myth. It was only in the 1990s that the left was able to morally blackmail the centre-right into being seen as someone not to make alliances with even on the local level.

Earlier, contacts between the FN and the right were quite common. There were local electoral alliances, common lists of candidates for the second round, politicians changing their allegiances this way or that. In the regional elections of 1986 for example the right took power thanks to the support of the FN in seven regions. In four of these, they were shoed in to the vice-leadership positions. Ten years later, it was completely different. Le Pen had won 15 percent in the presidential elections. The FN governed in a few large cities such as Toulon. But thanks to a unceasing political media campaign, the left succeeded in promoting the centre-right concept of the cordon sanitaire. In 1998, centre-right regional leaders, chosen by secret ballot, and supported by FN councillors even without a formal alliance ceded the ground to the socialists. They resigned just not to be besmirched by the tag of governing only thanks to the fascists. An alliance with the FN and plain support became something of a bad ghost that could spoil the noblest of political activity.

The Time for Marine Le Pen

One of the ways that governing leftists use to demonise the FN is to insinuate that its programme is against “republican values”. So does this mean that the party is unconstitutional? Absolutely not. If this were the case, that it proposed the breaking of French law and constitution then its de-legalisation would be a simple formality. French courts are similar to EC chief Ursula von der Leyen: they have the appropriate tools and use them. But who defines these values? No one. No critic has dared to define these mythical republican values ,like a witch-doctor who incants before the ghost.

Polish publicists have had similar dealings with French intellectuals reaching the heights of the absurd. Take the Krytyka Polityczna portal and the Jakub Majmurek Twitter spat. The periodical wrote without demur that a “non-white, non-Catholic French population is not being treated like full citizens by the RN.” This about the same party that from the very start favoured assimilation and did not differentiate between races or beliefs.

We now come to the next myth. Despite being described by critics as extreme-right and sympathisers of the FN and later RN as nationalist-right, it doesn’t chime with reality in any way. On the one hand, the evolution of the FN programme and the slide of the French political scene to the left has meant that the Gaullist centre right’s place has de facto been usurped by it. The Gaullists have themselves moved to the left. Today’s postulates of the RN in even the most controversial issues, such as migration or the relation to Euro-centralism from Brussels is nothing but the Gaullist programme for the RPR (Rassemblement pour la République, Rally for the Republic) from the 1980s and 1990s. Many of today’s comments by Marine Le Pen could find themselves on the lips of Gaullist leaders like Charles Pasqua and even Jacques Chirac before he won the presidential elections. The famous quip by Charles De Gaulle, defining France in the 1960 as “a European nation, racially white, culturally Greco-Latin and religiously Christian”, could have been uttered by Jean-Marie Le Pen but not quite by his daughter.

One more interesting observation. In the 1980s Le Pen’s party drew politicians and activists from the centre-right. The FN was strengthened by exceptional activists and intellectuals from the Club de l’Horloge with Bruno Mégret at the helm. He could not find his place in the UDF (Union Pour la Démocratie Francaise, Union for French Democracy ) nor in the RPR. In the twenty-first century the RN also draws personalities from other parties but also from the left. Florian Philippot is an example, the author of de-demonisation and calling himself a leftist Gaullist, who came form the group of Jean-Pierre Chevènement the former socialist premier, but euro-sceptic. But these transfers are often even more exotic for the alleged extreme right. The parliamentarian José Évrard had been a prominent French Communist Party activist for decades, Andréa Kotarac, the Lyon councillor transferred from the extreme left group of Jean-Luc Mélenchon who created the La France Insoumise (France Unbowed) movement.

Is this such a radical change? Is political scientist Jean-Yves Camus correct to say that ideology plays a lesser role in the RN? Maybe it was always thus. In first place it was always the political programme of the defence of France and French national society against various threats? Maybe the electorate demands this and the party merely follows its will, changing as the French nation changes. The electors are not extreme even though today two thirds of them have voted for Le Pen’s party at least once. They are patriots above all, without any strict political allegiance to political parties, loving their country and attached to a general and often hazy idea of the French model. They often react to their daily problems- insecurity, economic crises and a dislike of the political elite and find themselves in the discourse of the National Front.

–Adam Gwiazda

TVP WEEKLY. Editorial team and journalists

–Translated by Jan Darasz