As France was commemorating the tenth anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo attacks (the killing by Islamists of 12 cartoonists and journalists followed by the murder of three police officers, and four French Jews at a kosher supermarket), the news of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s death at 96 hit the headlines. French media had to suddenly divide airtime between the legacy of Charlie Hebdo and that of ‘the devil of France’s Fifth Republic’ in the words of the French weekly Le Point. An incongruous coincidence. Le Pen and his far-right party, the National Front, had been Charlie Hebdo’s favourite adversary, and the subject of their most ferocious caricatures since the early 1970s.

Jean-Marie Le Pen is the man who not only united France’s far right, but became its embodiment.

After the war and the purge of collaborateurs, those French citizens who had chosen to collaborate with Nazi occupiers, France’s Far Right was decimated, and its remaining members far too divided to form a coherent political group. There were ultra-Catholics, Royalists, Pétainistes from the Vichy era, and colonialist die-hards with little in common. Thirty years later, one man, Jean-Marie Le Pen, would force them to unite in a party, the National Front.

The son of a Breton fisherman and a seamstress, Jean-Marie Le Pen arrived in Paris in the late 1940s to study law and paid for his degree by working odd jobs on the side. Known in Paris’s Latin Quarter for taking part in street brawls against Communists, Le Pen soon enrolled in the French Foreign Legion to fight in Indochina. On his return, he ran in the general elections of 1956 for the populist party of Pierre Poujade, the leader of an anti-tax, anti-immigration and anti-establishment movement of shopkeepers. Thanks to the Fourth Republic’s proportional voting system, Le Pen was elected MP at the age of 27. The National Assembly then gave him special permission to go and fight in Algeria, convinced as he was that France should never relinquish its colonies. He would always resent Charles de Gaulle’s decision to accept Algeria’s independence.

Two years after being chosen as the leader of the first far-right umbrella party, the National Front, he ran in the presidential elections and scored less than one per cent in the first round. Forty-eight years later, his daughter Marine would reach 41.5 per cent of the popular vote in the second round of the Presidential elections opposite Emmanuel Macron. Four generations of French people have been witnesses to how his political ideas focused on immigration and national preference have slowly gained ground in the country, from the fringes to the mainstream, even if his person always remained a pariah. A survey shows that his disapproval ratings over the last 30 years oscillated between 70 to 87 per cent. More than a divisive figure, he was in fact a rejected one: rejected for his repeated incitement to hatred, which constantly landed him in legal trouble. However, many of his ideas spread wider and took roots in France.

Born in the 1970s, I grew up with the National Front. Intrigued by this vituperating man with an eye-patch on television, I remember as a small child asking if he was a pirate. He was scary. I was reassured and told that I shouldn’t worry, that he represented no one in the country. In 1986, however, thanks to the socialist president François Mitterrand’s change of the voting system, the wolf was let into the fold. For the first time, 35 Front National candidates were elected at the National Assembly, as many as there were Communist MPs. The event sent shock waves across France. ‘The fascists’ were in the house was the prevailing sentiment. In 1986, many French people who had lived through the war or were children of those who had suffered both Nazi occupation and French collaboration, alongside many former Résistants, were still alive and active. The presence of overtly xenophobic Holocaust deniers in the National Assembly was felt to be an abomination.

In 1988, aged 15, I attended a National Front rally in Paris with my Jewish friend Arnauld. We wanted to see and judge for ourselves. We had dressed conservatively; my friend was wearing some 1930s steel-rimmed glasses. We were nervous and naively hoped we looked the part. I will always remember the music of Wagner blaring out in the theatre and Jean-Marie Le Pen on stage with his six dobermans. As speeches began, we heard skinheads behind us say: ‘we’ll get pissed and come back’. At the end of the rally, which had merely been about Le Pen’s hatred for Jews and foreigners, a sea of French flags waved excitedly, and I remembered the words of Charles de Gaulle: ‘Patriotism is the love of one’s country. Nationalism is the hatred of all others.’

Today, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s party, run by his daughter Marine and renamed National Rally in 2018, is France’s single biggest force at the National Assembly. One can argue that its success today is due to Marine’s rejection of her father’s antisemitic and xenophobic rhetoric, and that she successfully purged the party from its overtly racist members when she took over in 2011. Didn’t she herself expel her father from the party four years later? It is true that Marine is not her father and doesn’t share his obsessions with the Second World War, Charles de Gaulle, and the French Empire. However, to ignore or forget who he was, what he said and advocated during his lifetime and to pretend that the National Rally bears no resemblance to the National Front would be a mistake and an affront to French history.

Since 1972 and the creation of the National Front, the French far right has been a family monopoly. The third Le Pen generation is very much active and is ready to replace Marine should she fail again at the next presidential elections. In 2012, Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, Jean-Marie’s grand-daughter, was elected an MP at the age of 22, making her the youngest ever député in France. A few hours after Jean-Marie died, Marion posted on X: ‘Be at peace, I will fulfill the mission you once gave me.’ Jean-Marie Le Pen may be dead but the poison he instilled in French politics will linger on for a very long time. Until we find a remedy.