Three Things Every Jew Needs to Hear at the Seder This Year
4 min read
9 min read
Much of the world is praising an antisemitic French politician. Don’t whitewash his legacy.
News consumers today might be forgiven for thinking that Jean-Marie Le Pen, who has died at the age of 96, was a loveable rapscallion. “Rabble-Rousing Leader of French Far Right,” is how the New York Times has described him. PBS’s headline labeled Le Pen as someone who was merely “accused” of antisemitism and racism. French President Emmanuel Macron sent condolences to Le Pen’s family and called him “a historic figure.”
This is outrageous. Jean-Marie Le Pen was an antisemite, a fascist, a racist, and a thug. Over decades in French politics he encouraged the pernicious idea that Jews aren’t “really” French, that Jews secretly control world politics, and that Nazis were the true heroes of World War II. He poisoned generations of French politics and his malign effects linger today.
Jean Marie Le Pen was born in a small village in Brittany in 1928. His father was killed during World War II when a fishing boat he was in triggered an underwater German mine. Le Pen later told journalists that he was anti-Nazi and tried to join the French Resistance as a child and was refused. Despite these early indications that Le Pen might feel strongly critical of Nazis, he later would insist that Nazi actions in France and elsewhere weren’t so bad.
Jean-Marie Le Pen (right) attends a veterans' rally in Paris in 1960. © AFP
He studied law in Paris then joined the French Foreign Legion at the age of 24 and served with distinction in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Algeria, and elsewhere. While in Algeria, he later admitted, he tortured prisoners of war. He “tortured because it had to be done,” he later claimed.
Le Pen joined forces with Pierre Poujade, a deeply racist and xenophobic politician who hated those he called “half-Frenchmen” and insisted that only those whose families had lived in France for at least three generations could ever enter politics. Le Pen and Poujade particularly hated then-Prime Minister Pierre Mendes France, who was Jewish. In 1956, with Poujade’s backing, Le Pen was elected to France’s parliament, the Assemblée nationale, where he was able to spew his anti-Jewish and anti-foreign bile in the French parliament.
In 1965, Le Pen ran the presidential campaign of Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignacour. Vignacour had worked for the Vichy French government, which ruled southern France during World War II and which served as a puppet state of the Nazi regime. (Just a few years later Vignacour would mastermind a bizarre attempt to move the body of Philippe Petain, the Vichy French collaborationist leader, and re-inter his body in a cemetery dedicated to war heroes.)
During this campaign, Le Pen defended Petain and the Vichy regime, ignoring the fact that Vichy France imposed a draconian Statut des Juifs, which barred Jews from public life, and enabled the roundup and arrests of French Jews. About 77,000 French Jews were murdered by Nazis during the Holocaust; in defending Nazi collaborationists, Le Pen was effectively condoning this mass murder. He insisted he’d “never considered (Vichy France’s pro-Nazi leader) Petain a traitor” and called him a greater hero than Charles de Gaulle, Free France’s wartime, anti-Nazi, leader.
During that campaign, Le Pen poked himself in the eye while trying to erect a tent, causing himself severe damage. He eventually lost his eye and wore an eyepatch from then on. He spread the false stories that he lost his eye in a fight over politics, just one of many falsehoods he told during his long, negative career in the political spotlight.
In 1972 Le Pen helped unite disparate Nazi groups under one banner, creating the Front National, known as FN or National Front in English. The FN emphasized what it called “national preference:” giving jobs, housing, and preferential treatment to people who are ethnically French. Immigrants, Muslims, and Jews were all considered interlopers who were polluting France by their very presence.
This hateful, extreme rhetoric paid off. In 1986, after changes in France’s electoral rules, the FN gained 35 seats in the National Assembly, France’s parliament. Le Pen ran for President five times, eventually coming in second place in 2002. (He was defeated in a runoff election against Jacques Chirac.) In 1984, the FN won 10% of France’s seats in the European Parliament; Le Pen became a Member of the European Parliament, charged with sitting in an institution - the European Community (today the European Union) - to which he was implacably opposed.
As more time passed after the end of World War II, Holocaust denial gained ground in France and around the world. Always hostile to Jewish interests, Le Pen embraced Holocaust denial with alacrity. In a 1987 interview, he doubted the existence of gas chambers in Nazi death camps: “I do not say that the gas chambers did not exist,” he blustered. “I have never particularly studied the issue, but I believe they are a point of detail in the history of World War Two.”
He never changed his tune, embracing Holocaust denial with ever greater vigor. In 2015, a French court convicted Le Pen of inciting racial hatred by claiming that Nazi gas chambers were a mere “detail” in the history of the Second World War. In 2018 he praised Robert Faurisson, the first French citizen to be convicted of Holocaust denial. Faurisson was a fanatical Holocaust denialist, claiming that The Diary of Anne Frank was a forgery, calling Nazi gas chambers “the biggest lie of the 20th Century.” and saying that Jews died of natural causes during the Holocaust. When he died, Le Pen claimed: “Faurisson is a symbol of the way free speech has been criminalized in” France and that France had “silenced” Faurisson for political reasons.
Perhaps Le Pen’s greatest legacy is the thorough, almost casual way he made antisemitism seem mainstream. He insisted that the Nazi occupation of France was “not especially inhumane.” How could it have been, when its main victims were not “true” French people, but merely Jews?
Le Pen repeated and amplified antisemitic tropes. “Jews have conspired to rule the world,” he told his many supporters. The United States is a “mongrel nation” because of the multitude of people of all races - including Jews - there. In 1987, he accused future French President Jacques Chirac of being in the pay of an American Jewish social organization. Asked why President Chirac was so opposed to the FN’s offensive policies, Le Pen replied “I am reduced to theories, particularly one of them: Chirac is in someone’s grasp. And whose? Jewish organizations and notably the notorious B’nai Brith.”
In 2007, Le Pen returned to his Jews-are-not-French lie, calling then-Presidential contender Nicolas Sarkozy, who has Jewish ancestry, of being a “foreigner,” and not French.
After Jean-Marie Le Pen’s daughter, Marine, took over the FN in 2011, FN members turned on a Jewish journalist at the party’s celebratory ball. Mickael Szames was a Jewish reporter for the prestigious France 24 television channel. As he took a picture of Le Pen dancing with his daughter, FN thugs attacked him, beating him screaming antisemitic abuse.
After Szames pressed charges against the NF guards, Jean-Marie Le Pen made a snide comment about Szames’ Jewish-looking nose: “Szames thought he could say that he was expelled because he was Jewish. Well, this wasn’t mentioned on his journalist card or on his nose!” All his daughter, Marine Le Pen, said on the matter was that her father should have mentioned Szames’ forehead instead of his nose.
Marine Le Pen, who took over the FN’s leadership 15 years ago, has sought to soften the party’s image. She’s rejected antisemitism, focusing her ire on immigrants and Muslims instead. In 2015 she expelled her father from the party, in part because of his anti-Jewish statements, and in 2018 renamed the party the Rassemblement National, or the National Rally (RN). Under her leadership, the RN has largely shed its extremist image and is considered a mainstream party by many French voters. Ousted from his beloved FN, Jean-Marie Le Pen formed a new political party, the Rassemblement blue blanc rouge, or “Blue, White and Red Party.” Poor health prevented him from turning his new group into a major political player. Jean-Marie Le Pen and his daughter eventually reconciled.
With his daughter Marine
Today, Marine Le Pen is one of France’s most popular politicians; many believe that she will one day lead France. Although she is currently under investigation for misusing European Parliament funds, her RN party remains one of the strongest in France. In the 2024 national elections, the RN proved the most popular in the country, winning 37% of the vote and taking 142 seats in France’s Assemblée nationale.
Today in France - and around the world - the effects of Le Pen’s and other Jew-haters’ legacies are plain to see. One recent survey found that misinformation about the Holocaust is rife in France. Only 2% of French people have heard of Drancy Concentration Camp, a Nazi prison outside of Paris where about 70,000 thousand Jews were detained on French soil before being sent to death camps. Shockingly, about a third of all French people say they either have not heard of the Holocaust or are not sure if they’ve heard of it.
Another 2024 survey found that 21% of French people feel it’s acceptable to attack French Jews because they support Israel; among people between the ages 18 and 24, fully 35% believe it is justified to attack Jews. A 2024 poll found that 12% of French people overall - and 17% of young people - feel it would be better for France if Jews left the country. A majority of young people feel that French Jews are not well integrated into France. 46% of all French people agree with seven or more anti-Jewish statements, a large increase in recent years.
Among those who vote for the RN, Le Pen’s renamed political party, 52% of respondents agree with six or more anti-Jewish statements. (The number is even higher - 55% - for the far-left political party La France Insoumise, or “France Unbowed.”)
Given this legacy, it’s shameful that so many people in France and around the world are equivocating about Jean-Marie Le Pen’s violent, hateful legacy. Let’s remember him for what he was: not a lovable rascal or a brave leader, but a brutal, hateful antisemite who’s made France - and the world - a more dangerous place.
Interesting, isn't it, that the timing of the exit of this despicable excuse for a human being from our world so closely coincides with that of another of his ilk, though JC was American.
Surely, where they both are now, they're "enjoying" roasted peanuts!
May his name be blotted out forever.
Anything that saves Europe from Islam is acceptable.
Does his daughter Marine LePen share his views? If not, she could be a viable candidate for leadership as she voices views in public that would address the poisonous demographic cancer in France. Otherwise, TREF!. Who knows what she says in private?
Jean-Marie Le Pen's FN has failed to become a government party during 30 years,mostly because he was marginalized by his declarations about the german occupation during WW2 and his Holocaust denial which were an ambarassement among the members of his own party including his daughter. The relatively high (15 %) minority of the peoples who voted for him were angry voters because of social issues and mass immigration especially the Muslim one,not antisemites( anyway 80 % of antisemitic violence in France and 100% of antisemitic murders since 2000 are caused by Muslim immigrants or french peoples with muslim ancestry)
I’m happy he’s finally dead!! I have only exploitives to speak of about him. Horrible human being!!
Why don't you then write
Explicate, please.
You, not the article, are full of lies!
We can understand why he loved Trump so much.
Trump is the greatest friend that Israel has ever had.
Racist,sexist,homophobic,hateful,dishonest,corrupted ,imperialist ,'and the nazis have done good things'
That may be, but it’s not because of the Jews. He does it for the evangelical vote. He’s horrendous for America where we live.
With ally like that,you don't need ennemies,ask the ukrainians...
It's just plain sad,that's what it is.Sad,and dam scary.Don't visit France!!
Good!!! We don't need you !!!
Another 2024 survey found that 21% of French people feel it’s acceptable to attack French Jews because they support Israel; among people between the ages 18 and 24, fully 35% believe it is justified to attack Jews.
I wonder how many of those are Muslim...
No need to wonder as the majority are muslim.
Le Pen and Hitler are now living in some dark dirty alley in the afterlife.
wishful thinking
It is wishful thinking, but from Hitler's etc perspective. He is now experiencing a daily slow barbecue treatment from which he is afterwards revived to do it again (or something similar). He's screaming and begging with all his might to 'only' have to deal with a grimy alley or such.
You are too kind!
Thank you for this helpful piece.
Viva La France except if you’re a Jew. You’re not a part of but apart from. No shock there. Just study the history and the facts.
That's the truth.
Study american History,you'll find a lot too ( have a look about Klaus Barbie)
Just goes to show that Israel is the only safe place for Jews.
Jews are being killed by Arabs almost daily tell me how it,s safe.
Because it belongs to us.
Thank you for sharing this shameful story
M. Le Pen was both antisemitic and anti-Arab and the 'details of history' comment unacceptable obviously, even if 'better' than a complete denial. However, the article is biased since like elsewhere, most modern antisemitism is now from the extreme left and their political alliance with French muslims, about 20% of the population. French Jews now vote in large numbers for Mme. Le Pen or M. Zemmour (Jewish himself) and further to the right. The lack of Holocaust knowledge is typical elsewhere and at least M. Le Pen warned about the danger of mass muslim immigration so his political legacy was mixed.
Anyway the only 2 % of the french who have heard about the Drancy internement camp is a complete non-sense, it's teach at school ( We have heard a lot about it during the last weeks since the fall of Assad regime who has protected Aloys Brunner, the cruel german commandant of the camp)