For all of my adult life, the Le Pen family has felt like a shadow hanging over my head. Jean-Marie, the father, used to make jokes about the Holocaust. He was a former French paratrooper in Algeria who was accused of torturing prisoners. Then along came his daughter, Marine, who looked less threatening but more ambitious. Then her niece, Marion, who proved even more reactionary.
The Le Pen influence appeared to be growing, but I always had the naive idea that “reasonable” people, from the right as well as from the left, would never let them win. It proved true in 2002 when Jean-Marie Le Pen made it to the second round of the presidential election: the French then voted massively for Jacques Chirac. It proved true again in 2017 and 2022, when Marine also reached the second round and was defeated by Emmanuel Macron, the promising young outsider who wanted to dismantle the left-right dividing line. It’s no longer true.
