I only knew Jean-Marie Le Pen on television. As with many children of my generation, the founder of the National Front appeared on the screen of my parents’ living room one evening in April 2002 and threw half of my school into the streets of my town. At the time, the youth were “annoying” the FN, and we were singing Damien Saez and Diam’s in the back of the school bus. With his square jaw, his glass eye and his far-right rhetoric, Jean-Marie Le Pen represented our first political emotion.
When I joined the political department of L’Express, in 2019, I was 28 years old, and had long since put my portable music player away. Hired to cover the news of the National Rally, the obvious becomes clear: you must ask for an audience at the “Menhir”, as a Vaticanist would seek to approach the Pope. The interview serves as an initiation rite; the seniority of a “rubricard” is measured by the number of his visits to the Montretout estate, in Saint-Cloud, in this mansion where the former presidential candidate still kept his offices, at 96 years old. “Have you met the dogs too, Sergeant and Major?” To the two imposing labradors, I quickly preferred the greyhounds, Camilla and Stella, who place their muzzles on my knees when Jean-Marie Le Pen receives me at his residence in Rueil-Malmaison, where he lives with his wife Jany.
Can I write it down? Before knocking on the heavy green gate of Montretout, while I was consumed by fear, my editor-in-chief said to me, with a touch of envy: “Have fun.” It’s been a long time since Jean-Marie Le Pen was scary. Age has rendered harmless this far-right tribune, who popularized his racist and xenophobic ideas in France, before handing over to his daughter, Marine Le Pen, in 2011. As a journalist, we now come to see him to understand a movement which today brings together a third of the electorate. We are also getting closer, let’s admit it, because the man has kept the meaning of the formula, which is often nasty. In a paper, his barbs sent to Marine Le Pen often hit the mark.
For a politics enthusiast, these meetings have a taste of forbidden pleasure. Dialogue with Jean-Marie Le Pen is to exchange with a man who has known (almost) everything about the 20th century; from the Second World War to the conflicts in Indochina and Algeria; from the Fourth Republic, Pierre Poujade era, to the Fifth, under which he founded one of the most powerful parties in contemporary history, and ran five times in the presidential election.
It is also listening to the father of Marine Le Pen, of whom he is as much the mentor as the detractor. Both an actor of the past and a commentator of the present, he is, on the far right, a hero that we admire, described as a visionary having imposed his themes – immigration, security – in the public debate. For the others, more numerous, he is this devil of the Republic, accustomed to racist declarations, several times condemned for advocating war crimes, contesting crimes against humanity, provoking hatred and racial violence.
In front of me, Jean-Marie Le Pen is also this old man over 90 years old, walking with difficulty, to whom you have to shout his questions. In four years at L’Express, I took part in this exercise around ten times. I don’t regret it.
Marion Maréchal, Jordan Bardella and Joan of Arc
Let’s start again. To request an interview, you have to go through Lorrain de Saint-Affrique, his eternal press officer, a dark-haired man with the air of a faded crooner and an ashen voice, who probes your motivations. “Why do you want to see Jean-Marie Le Pen?” Once the interview is scheduled, you will be given the address and codes (they change often). The encounter with 9, Parc de Montretout is in itself a novel. In this 430 square meter mansion, surrounded by 4,800 square meters of gardens, and bequeathed in questionable conditions by a wealthy patron in 1976, the small story meets the big one, and political crusades mingle with the family life of the Le Pen.
When entering the large garden, you never know who you will bump into: Marion Maréchal and her daughters, coming to visit their mother Yann, who lives on one floor of the house? Or Jordan Bardella, straight from his former partner, another Le Pen granddaughter, who lives on the estate? The oldest were able to see Marine Le Pen there, when she lived in an outbuilding at the back of the park. Since September 2014, she has left the nest.
The ritual is always the same: we wait in a living room from another age with a disproportionately high ceiling, sitting on a blue and yellow sofa whose springs have ceased to fulfill their function. A painting of the owner in an officer’s costume gazes at you. The first time, I asked myself: how many colleagues before me have passed through here since the 1970s? Dozens, maybe a hundred, French or foreign? Hearing the creaking floorboards above my head, I always wonder who precedes me with the “Old Man”: another journalist, a former comrade or a young activist, one of those who come to visit the Menhir as one goes on a pilgrimage, bringing back a selfie instead of the vial of holy water?
Here, everything is symbol. Joan of Arc, erected as the patron saint of the extreme right, whose busts, statuettes and engravings adorn each room. The boats too, whose imposing models are placed here and there. The Breton, born in Trinidad and son of a fisherman, has never stopped proclaiming his love of the sea. In the office, upstairs, a few sabers and a rifle, placed near the window. A big clock, finally, on the mantelpiece, reminds us that time has passed. When we last met, Jean-Marie Le Pen was 94 years old.
The unfrequented
No one listens to him anymore, but Jean-Marie Le Pen tirelessly repeats the same obsessions in each interview: the migratory submersion, which according to him will fall on France and Europe, the world population, which has gone “from 2 billion to 8 in fifty years”… “The easiest thing for man to do is feed mouths. It’s pleasant in the moment, but it’s brief, and fraught with consequences,” he grumbles. -he. Jean-Marie Le Pen is obsessed with demography and immigration, convinced that millions of poor Africans will soon throw themselves at our borders… “All the Air France planes would not be enough to send the Algerians home…”, breathes the old defender of French Algeria.
Often it stops short. I’m getting scared. In the spring of 2022, the nonagenarian had to cancel our interview the same morning, suffering a slight stroke. My relations with Marine Le Pen are already not very good: what will she think if her father were to die during an interview with L’Express? I hope to find another way to pass on to journalistic posterity. Looking towards the sky, chin forward, Jean-Marie Le Pen passes his tongue over his lips. The seconds pass. Suddenly, he laughs and says: “I have lost my strength and my life. And my friends and my cheerfulness. God speaks, we must respond to him. The only good that remains for me in the world. Is to have sometimes cried. The verses are beautiful, they are by Alfred de Musset. But contrary to the title of the poem, Sadness, Jean-Marie feels no sadness. He screams, hilarious: “TOMORROW IS AN OTHER DAY.”
I once asked Jean-Marie Le Pen what continued to give him pleasure. He had just released volume 2 of his Memoirs, in which he seriously scratched his daughter. Jokingly, he replies: “YOU!” I understood at that moment that he was one of those men who only gave up fighting once they were dead and buried, and that he would continue to receive journalists until the end, as much to convince as to kill the boredom. “Life is so short… You realize that better at my age than at yours.” Sixty-three years separate us. My grandparents are seventeen years younger than Jean-Marie Le Pen.
He once got angry with me. I once asked him if he wasn’t afraid of what people would think of him. “I don’t care,” he waved away. I insist. Does he not regret having embodied the figure of rejection of the other, of having lent himself to racist puns, to anti-Semitic innuendoes and of having maintained a negationist perfume? “What excesses? Regrets ma’am, but in relation to what line? Who sets these rules? I only believe in freedom of expression!”, he loses his temper one last time. Then he suddenly calmed down. Between two fits of wet coughing, the old man started to sing Bad Reputationby Brassens. “Everyone will come to see me hanged. Except the blind, of course!” Until the end, this man was unapproachable.