The Details in Le Pen's History Reveal His Fascism

Peter Brownfeld

Peter Brownfeld recently completed a master's degree in history at the London School of Economics and he now works at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C.

Jean-Marie Le Pen, the now world-famous French politician, has been labeled as a fascist. He is widely attacked as a Nazi and an apologist for the holocaust.

Michael Grove offered this vivid depiction in The Times of London:

The monster lives! With stiff limbs plundered from the charnel house of European history, a criminal's heart stolen from the graveyard of dead ideologies, bile transfused from warriors who fell in foolish causes and a revived memory attuned to the darkest of fears, the creature is loosed upon the earth. Its advance horrifies and transfixes us, playing on memories we thought buried. Jean-Marie Le Pen is fascism's Frankenstein.

The French, too, attack the runner-up in the first round of their presidential election. They had to save "France's soul," as President Jacques Chirac argued. Socialist leaders urged the left to vote in force for Chirac to save "the honor of France."

But has everyone gotten it right? Although we hear many voices attacking Le Pen, the only line representing his anti-Semitic beliefs or Nazi sympathies is that he believes the holocaust was a "detail" of history. While this statement is certainly insensitive, one comment is not the sum of a man.

Le Pen's campaign was absent of anti-Semitic rhetoric. He even appealed for Jewish votes by promising to bring law and order to the largely Arab and African suburbs, which he holds responsible for France's crime problem. In fact, recent anti-Semitic attacks in France have probably even bolstered his support.

There are probably Jews who might think that [Le Pen's strong showing] serves the Muslims right and even very few who actually voted for Le Pen . . .

said Michael Zaoui, a member of the French Jewish representative council. Patrick Klugman, head of France's Jewish student union, agreed:

Some [Jews] harbor a strong anti-Arab sentiment because of Israel, because of all those attacks, and if they live in a suburb where there is crime, they may react like this.

As he preached his seemingly inclusive rhetoric, Le Pen said:

I call on the French of all races, religions and social conditions to rally round this historic chance for a national recovery.

Maybe we have been unfair to Le Pen. Maybe his famous "detail" in history line was just one detail in a long speaking career. Who is the real Le Pen? To answer this question, we must look at his history and ideological forebears.

A major French news magazine, Le Nouvel Observateur, called Robert Brasillach Le Pen's ideological predecessor. Brasillach was a well-known literary figure in France in the 1930s and 1940s. In 1993 Le Pen equated Brasillach's death with that of a French naval officer who was executed by the Wehrmacht in 1941. Both, says Le Pen, died at the "martyr age," in their early thirties. Le Pen quoted one of Brasillach's poems: "Blood that has flowed is always pure blood."

Who is this Brasillach? He was a well-known collaborator during World War II. He used his literary skills to praise the occupiers, and to turn in those who did not fit into the Nazi order. France executed Brasillach for treason in 1945. This is the man who Le Pen tried to equate with a murdered French soldier. This is the man whose reputation Le Pen has tried to clean. Le Pen and Brasillach equated collaboration with resistance as long as the men believed in their ideals. Le Pen could not see the difference between those who fought against the Nazis and those who embraced them.

Brasillach's character is unambiguous. He is the literary version of Pierre Laval, the Vichy prime minister who bowed to the Nazis' every desire. In 1944 Brasillach, speaking of the occupation, wrote:

Frenchmen given to reflection, during these years, will have more or less slept with Germany-not without quarrels-and the memory of it will remain sweet for them.

Brasillach used a thin allegory of the "Monkey Question" in discussing how to solve what some termed the "Jewish Question." Even worse, he used his column in Je Suis Partout to denounce violators of Vichy and German law. He turned in Jewish doctors who were continuing to practice, journalists writing under false names, and families trying to change identity. Full of sinister sarcasm, after providing all the details of a violation, he wrote:

The Jew David Rubiné . . . plays dumb. He continues to practice. Perhaps it will be enough to point out to the Prefect of the Eure, responsible for carrying out the law.

There is still more in the Le Pen dossier. He produced a series of long-playing records, in which he offers his revisionist history of World War II. On these recordings he uses Nazi propaganda, including a segment from "Voice of the Reich." He characterizes Hitler's rise as the result of "a powerful mass movement finally popular and democratic."

Should there still be any doubt about Le Pen's true beliefs and the disturbing reality of his statements, the French courts cleared this up in 1968 when they convicted him of "apologizing for war crimes," a misdemeanor in France. In a different era Le Pen would have been another Brasillach and would have used his rhetoric to support the Nazis.

Few defend such an unpalatable politician. He has been attacked everywhere. It is important to know that these denunciations are made accurately. While many writers have not dug deep enough, their assessment has not been inaccurate. He may now direct his bile at the Arabs and Africans rather than the Jews, but if Le Pen's history and heroes are any indication, this does not represent a shift in ideology. It just shows his calculation that racism will win more votes than anti-Semitism.

Fortunately the French followed the presidential election's sad slogan of voting for a crook rather than a fascist, and gave Chirac a wide margin of victory. Likewise, French voters convincingly defeated the National Front in the June parliamentary elections. Le Pen will never be president of France, but he will be a political force, and it is important to know who he really is.