“I have always lived with the anti-Semitism of Jean-Marie Le Pen,” confided his first wife, Pierrette. Their affair lasted almost 30 years, until a stormy divorce in 1987.
Pierrette Le Pen was Jean-Marie Le Pen’s first wife. They married in 1960, she is the mother of his three daughters. The two spouses met in 1958 during a gala evening and their divorce was finalized in 1987, the occasion of a major public outcry. Pierrette had posed as a maid in Playboy to provoke her former husband, when the latter refused to pay her alimony.
“If she needs money, all she has to do is clean,” he said. Challenge immediately accepted by Pierrette Le Pen in issue 23 of the adult magazine, titled “Madame Le Pen naked does the cleaning”. Highly publicized, their divorce was an opportunity for the two spouses to each take turns arguing in the press.
“At home, he was in charge”
“I needed to show that I was free and that I could be something other than a wife in the shadow of a politician,” she said years later. Is the fault in the heavy daily environment? In any case, this is what she confided, without concessions, to Karl Zero in 1998: “At home, it was he (Jean-Marie Le Pen) who was in charge. He had very rigid principles”, she confided. “Politics came before everything, even before family. It isolated us enormously (…) I always lived in the anti-Semitism of Jean-Marie Le Pen. My daughters were raised in primary anti-Semitism”, had -she even launched.
As a reminder, a few years before their divorce, an episode could actually explain the beginning of the deterioration of relations between Pierrette Le Pen and her husband, even beyond the photos published in Playboy and experienced as a final provocation and humiliation by the ” Menhir”.
In 1984, Pierrette Le Pen began a relationship with Jean Marcilly, biographer of Jean-Marie Le Pen. Made public, this affair would have led to their separation. Three years later, the divorce was finalized. “I was betrayed by the one I trusted the most,” confided Jean-Marie Le Pen in his memoirs. A wound that remained open until his death on Tuesday January 7, 2025 at the age of 96.