Step inside an office building in the town of Nanterre, just west of Paris, and you are confronted by what the nostrils register as an odor of the past, for it’s a rare thing these days to encounter the lingering taint of cigarette smoke in public spaces. The trail of it leads upstairs to a corner office and to the woman who has, in the past few months, come to dominate French newspapers and chat shows, where she is depicted variously as the new face of European bigotry or a herald of a new European political realignment.
After being elected president of the National Front Party in January, Marine Le Pen sat with her father and predecessor, Jean-Marie Le Pen, at the party's congress in Tours.Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s far-right National Front Party, greeted me with an aggressive handshake and the abrupt body language of a person who has a lot to do. It was mid-March. A flurry of polls had just come out showing that she would beat Nicolas Sarkozy if the French presidential election were held at that moment (the election will take place a year from now), and she was working hard to press her advantage. She wore a simple navy blue suit and no jewelry, and her hair was pulled back somewhat haphazardly, with stray wisps dangling. Her gaze is steely, but her eyes have humor in them. Her deep voice, with its smoker’s rasp, carries authority.
Her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, was a founder of the National Front in 1972 and served as its leader, and perennial presidential candidate, until his retirement in January, at 82. Along the way, thanks in part to his penchant for crisply expressed opinions — that the Nazi occupation of France was “not particularly inhuman,” that the gas chambers were “a detail,” that “the races are unequal,” that someone with AIDS is “a kind of leper,” that “Jews have conspired to rule the world” — he and his party became emblems of European right-wing extremism. The height of his popularity came in 2002, when he reached second place in the initial round of voting for president and won the right to enter a head-to-head contest with the incumbent president, Jacques Chirac. Le Pen was trounced in that election, and his party faded as a force to be reckoned with.
Then in January, Marine — at 42, the youngest of his three daughters — won a battle to succeed her father as president of the party. Almost overnight, she brought the National Front not just back into the spotlight but also into outright competition. The polls that show her matching or outpacing Sarkozy have shuffled the French political game board. Of late, Sarkozy has fired his diversity minister, declared that multiculturalism has been “a failure” and staged a “debate on Islam” that French Muslims saw as a swat at them — all moves that are widely viewed as a direct response to Marine Le Pen’s rise. She derided Sarkozy’s support for the recently enacted ban on full face veils as a pandering political maneuver that addressed only “the tip of the iceberg” of what she views as the Islamization of French culture.
Marine Le Pen’s sudden prominence draws attention to the contrasts between her and the man she hopes to replace. Where Sarkozy is stylish, Le Pen tends toward simplicity. Where he has become, to many, a classic say-anything-to-please-anyone politician, Le Pen’s followers find her to be a straight-talker. Sarkozy is seen as representing the elitists who support the increasingly unpopular European Union, while Le Pen wraps herself in the mantle of the French republic. Even in derisive nicknames, she comes across as the stronger: Sarkozy is Monsieur Bling Bling; Le Pen has been called la peste blonde — a play on both la peste noire, the French term for the Black Death, and, more recently, la peste brune, which referred to the Nazi menace.
“Never in modern French history has the far right challenged like this,” Frédéric Micheau, adjunct director of the French polling agency IFOP, told me. “This is something totally new.” This jump in support for so polarizing a figure raises a question that has ramifications not only in France but also in other places where the far right is resurgent: is Le Pen fille a different person from her father, or has racism simply become mainstream?
When I asked Le Pen to identify something from her childhood that formed her, she said, “20 kilos of dynamite.” In 1976, when she was 8, a bomb tore off the front of the family’s apartment building in Paris while they were asleep. “I realized politics could cost you your life,” she said flatly. As the daughters of a greatly reviled politician, she and her two sisters grew up in an atmosphere of fear and intimidation — taunted by other children and shunned by teachers. “Our childhood was marked by a sense of injustice concerning our father,” her sister Yann Marechal wrote me in an e-mail. “We were the victims of many forms of attack,” Le Pen told me, “of virulent press campaigns and a lot of reprobation from the elites. That forged my character, and it also strengthened me.”
The family has a closeness, and a dedication to an iconic ideal of the French state, that seems almost cultish. All three girls became party stalwarts; all married within the party. (One sister, however, Marie-Caroline, followed her husband after he broke with the National Front.) Marine’s first two husbands were party officials, as is her current partner, Louis Aliot. Her 12-year-old daughter, Jehanne, is named after Joan of Arc (down to the medieval spelling); her son, Louis, who is 11 (and has a twin, Mathilde), is named after “the whole series of great kings of France named Louis,” Le Pen said. Yann Marechal told me that despite the four-year age difference between her and Marine, the two of them “have always lived like twins” and that she and her children live together with Marine and her children “on the property of my father, so that we see each other and our children regularly.” Le Pen said they all vacation together at their father’s birthplace in Brittany.
Conspicuously absent from this family portrait is the mother. The other great scar on Le Pen’s childhood besides the bomb, she said, was created by her mother’s leaving the family — in the arms of her father’s biographer, no less — and her parents’ ugly divorce when she was 15. That period reached its culmination when her mother posed nearly nude in French Playboy and told interviewers that her ex-husband had a rabid hatred of Jews and privately referred to Adolf Hitler as Uncle Dolfie. Marine did not speak to her mother for the next 15 years.
13Russell Shorto (rs@russellshorto.com) is a contributing writer, and the director of the John Adams Institute in Amsterdam. Editor: Vera Titunik (v.titunik-MagGroup@nytimes.com).
