Jean Marie Le Penwho was the leader of the French extreme right for four decades and founder of the French National Front in 1972, died this Tuesday, January 7 at the age of 96. He had spent his last weeks in the hospital, suffering from serious health problems. The year 2025 thus brings the closing of a stage in French politics, of which it is also a part Marine Le Penwho always made his father’s absences and constant attacks ugly. Their relationship was always difficult, but later it became unsustainable.
“He never behaved like a father. I guess I will never be able to free myself from the fear of him.”. This is how the current deputy of the National Assembly defined her father, known in her country as “the old devil.” These words are part of her memoirs, in which she recorded the selfishness with which her parents treated her three daughters, who were aware of the weight that their father had in the country when, as children, they suffered an attack on the family home. , in Paris. He November 2, 1976, a bomb fell on Ville Poirier while the three minors were alone in the house.. Their parents left them alone to go to dinner at a friends’ house.
Politics, before family
Le Pen’s parents divorced in 1987, which was traumatic for her, as the traditional and peaceful image that the moralistic marriage offered until then was blown up. During those years, the lawyer felt closer to her father, but their relationship has gone through numerous ups and downs. “In that family, politics is more important than blood,” assessed the journalist Olivier Beaumont. Jean-Marie already warned: “I have never been able to worry about my daughters”.
In the last decade, the leader of the ultra National Regrouping party has highlighted the distance between father and daughter, which has been marked by numerous tensions that have crossed family lines, altering their political positions. In this sense, Both have starred in some moments for the memory of the French peoplelike when Jean-Marie went to the Place de l’Opéra and boycotted his daughter’s speech. Members of the National Front had to remove him from the scene.
Jean Marie’s first death
A few days before this episode, the person who was at that time the honorary president of the far-right party declared that “the German gas chambers” were “a small detail of history”. Some statements that cost him his position and his expulsion from the National Front on May 4. However, the politician resorted to justice and managed to have his militancy restored. Later he once again praised the figure of Marshal Petain at the head of Nazi-occupied France.
Her daughter took action. “His status as honorary president does not authorize him to hijack the National Front with rude provocations whose sole objective is to annoy me”he expressed, removing his father from politics. “A murder orchestrated by your own daughter is never pleasant,” the patriarch responded. More and more insurmountable differences separated them both.
“We have become irreconcilably distant. He is still full of hatred and driven by a thirst for revenge. This is not the first time we have fought. In 2011, when I decided to run for the presidency of the party, he even spoke of “demonizing the National Front” and added that this led to nothing. But that time we continued working together. Today I can’t imagine how we could regain contact,” the lawyer said in an interview in 2015, in XL Weekly.
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