The proof: Jean-Marie Le Pen’s new memoir is a best seller, even though the patriarch of France’s far right never came close to attaining high office, is nearly 90, and has been pushed out of the National Front by his own daughter Marine nearly 50 years after he founded the party.
His unrepentant extremism — on race, World War II, the Holocaust, gender, torture, immigrants — led Ms. Le Pen to kick him out. Those views can still shock, and his compatriots are lapping them up.
«The migration phenomenon,» Mr. Le Pen began, in an interview at the old mansion in the Paris suburbs he inherited years ago from a wealthy acolyte, «is a tsunami.» He added grimly, «They have a fertility rate three times ours.»
«Fils de la Nation,» or «Son of the Nation,» the first of two planned volumes of memoirs, with a 50,000 print run, has already sold out, says the publisher, Muller, a small right-wing house that took the book after more prestigious French publishers refused it.
He lost elections for more than a half-century, but Mr. Le Pen feels he is now getting the last laugh. He is not surprised by his book’s success. «I was a man of good will who never knew political success,» he said.
«But my ideas have made progress, even in the programs of my opponents. That’s why my struggle was not without value,» Mr. Le Pen continued, smiling slightly. Indeed, the hard-line immigration policies of the current French president, Emmanuel Macron, sound like a distant echo of the far-right patriarch.
There are his well-known views — his admiration for France’s collaborationist World War II leader, Marshal Pétain; his hatred of the country’s liberator, Charles de Gaulle; his casual anti-Semitism and racism; his approval of torture in the Algerian war — but it is the sense that Mr. Le Pen’s long life encompasses the whole sweep of postwar French history, albeit darkly, that accounts in part for his current bookstore triumph.
Mr. Le Pen writes in vivid colloquial prose of a life in a string of fascinating chapters: as a war part-orphan, having lost his fisherman father to a mine in 1942 when he was 14, making him a «pupil of the Nation,» as they were designated; as a boisterous law student in postwar Paris, already militating at the far-right edge; as a French Foreign Legion paratrooper who volunteered to fight the Vietminh in an already-lost colonial war in 1953 out of «patriotism»; as a parliamentary deputy in 1956, the youngest in France, hurling a vicious anti-Semitic insult at the revered former prime minister Pierre Mendès France; as a tough-talking paratrooper in the battle of Algiers who defended his colleagues’ use of torture but denied practicing it himself; and, finally, as the marginally employed, far-right agitator who, pushed along by a buddy who was a wartime Nazi collaborator, François Brigneau, founded the National Front in 1972 as, Mr. Le Pen said, «the grandest French adventure since World War II.»
Mr. Le Pen turned, unprompted, to the Holocaust, the subject that sank the fortunes of the National Front. He has repeatedly called the gas chambers a «detail» in the history of World War II.
«Look, the gas chambers, I didn’t personally see them,» Mr. Le Pen said. Turning angry, he said, «cost me 30,000 euros» — in fines, about $37,000, for Holocaust denial, which is a crime in France.
«Well, that was a pretty lightweight pretext to ostracize me, anyway,» he concluded.