She wants to defend a nostalgic version of France from an army of perceived threats – globalisation, competition, immigration and Islamism. Our piece from 2016 looks at the rise of Marine Le Pen
a cold November night in 1976, 20 kilogrammes of explosives ripped the exterior wall off an apartment building in the 15th arrondissement of Paris. The block was in Villa Poirier, a quiet street in a residential stretch of southern Paris, near the Metro station Sèvres-Lecourbe. Twelve apartments were destroyed; a baby, falling from the wreckage, was saved by the branches of a tree.
The young girl scarred by her father’s battles has found a way to connect with France’s discontented. She calls this electorate “the forgotten of the French republic” – the young people struggling to find work and the working poor battling to make ends meet, who in the past might have turned to the Communist Party.
Life changed abruptly for the Le Pen family not long after the bombing. A rich cement magnate with far-right leanings, Hubert Lambert, died without children, leaving his mansion and fortune to the strugglingleader. So the family left their narrow Parisian street for the rarefied and gated 19th-century estate of Montretout, which stood on a ridge in Saint-Cloud to the west of the capital.
Her childhood was decidedly peculiar. Her mother walked out when she was 16, took up with a journalist, who had been researching a biography of Jean-Marie and ended up seducing his wife. Le Pen did not see her mother for 15 years: “My world fell apart.” Huguette Fatna, a Martinican who is godmother to Le Pen’s second daughter, told me that her mother’s exit “tore her apart”. And that was not the end of it.
Yet the pull of politics got the better of her. She was frustrated as a lawyer – “my character doesn’t predispose me to being a spectator” – and struggling to build up clients. The name didn’t help. Politics engulfed her, as it did the entire Le Pen family. The clannish nature of the movement and the constant blurring of lines between family and party – when dinners would turn political and politics turn into love affairs – drew the daughters in despite themselves.
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