The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
Le Pen family values
With Marine’s bid for presidential power around the corner, Harry de Quetteville gets a rare glimpse inside the Le Pen family home – feuds, fights, killer pets and all
The woman who would be the next president of France has never concealed her love of pussycats. It is as t hough she wants you to believe she is one. That would be a mistake. But though Marine Le Pen rarely misses the opportunity to soften her image by posing with a moggie, there is no doubting her genuine love of the animals. When she collapses on t he sofa af ter a long day, having exchanged work suit and leather boots for tracksuit and bare feet, there they are, jumping up for another stroke. ‘I am,’ she likes to say, ‘extremely attached to my cats.’
Her father, Jean-marie, who founded the Front National (FN) which his daughter now leads, in 1972, is another breed altogether. For years he lav ished affection on his dogs – dobermanns, whose combination of elegance and menace he always seemed to relish.
For more than three decades, until 2014, the cat lady and the dog fan rubbed along together. Despite the fact that she aspired to the highest political office in the land, and was approaching her 46th birthday, Marine Le Pen still lived at home, at Montretout, the grand house on the outskirts of Paris where she had grown up. There, in the gardens of a redbrick mansion built by Napoleon III for his chef de cabinet, the Le Pens and their pets kept a wary eye upon one another.
Then, three years ago, things turned bloody. First, in spring, Marine’s cat, Balou, strayed too close to Jean-marie’s dogs, Sergent and Major. A few months later her beloved pure-bred Bengal, Artémis, was snapped up too. Marine was on holiday in Spain at the time. But when the call came through, she made one of the swift, unbending decisions for which she is famous within her camp: she was finally moving out. ‘That’s it,’ she told her mother. ‘It’s over.’
In fact, it was just the beginning of a political and personal turf war that proved father and daughter, too, could fight like cat and dog. Now that war is finished – and this time Marine has emerged the victor, having stripped JeanMarie of his title, kicked him out of his own party and taken sole control of its destiny. Today they no longer see each other. As for Marine’s surviving cats, they live safely with her, her par tner and their five children, in a large house once occupied by the footballer Claude Makélélé.
When I visit Jean-marie, by contrast, he is still in the old place, its faded grande ur and echoing emptiness cruel reminders that his glory days are behind him. Sure, the dogs are still around, as intimidating as ever. But in his office, with its view over Paris, 88-year-old Jean-marie can only reminisce about the good times – about the day in 2002 he shocked the political establishment by scoring 17 per cent in the first round of the French presidential election, only to be flattened by Jacques Chirac in the second.
Yet for Marine the best seems all to come. She receives visitors at the new headquarters of the FN just a few hundred metres from the presidential Elysée Palace, to which she hopes to move in May, eclipsing the achievement of her father. Her own second-round adversary will likely be the Republicans’ François Fill on, struggling against corruption charges, or the barely tested centrist Em manuel Macron. As things stand, she is within a few percentage point sofa triumph that, in its significance for Europe, would dwarf the rise of Donald Trump to the White House.
This is the fruit of a Eurosceptic, protectionist campaign which, in its conscious effort to modernise and broaden its appeal, has scrupulously tried to efface almost every trace of her father and his infamous views on, among other things, Marshal Pétain, Jews and the gas chambers. Putting France first remains a key theme. But gone are his emblem – a flaming tricolour – and the very name Le Pen, replaced on her website and posters with the less toxic handle ‘Marine’. She describes herself as the ‘anti-merkel’ and can present herself when necessary as ‘anti Jean-marie’. But the truth is that Marine Le Pen will never shake off the years she spent in one of France’s most extraordinary households.
It is a story that for many decades played out at Montretout. The name literally means ‘show everything’, and that, for the Le Pen family, is exactly what happened: every squabble, every fight, every triumph and humiliation was enacted on the public stage, in the house that was part family home, part FN campaign headquarters. For half a century the Le Pens have staged a drama so remarkable that, even if they were unknown, there would still be every reason to script it. Take into account that their story comprises mysterious legacies, betrayal, espionage, twilit escapes, the secret handover of a glass eye, photo shoots for Playboy, assassination attempts,
and the aspiration to sweep to national power on a far-right agenda – well, few would believe it if you did write it down.
But believe you must. For here is Montretout, sitting atop the hill of Saint-cloud, just west of Paris, after a steep ascent from the banks of the Seine. And here, sitting in his Louis XV armchair, amid piles of books and party literature, is the patriarch who holds court still in a study exactly one floor beneath what, 40 years ago, first became young Marine’s
From top Presidential candidate Marine Le Pen with her niece, Marion Maréchal-le Pen, a Front National member of parliament; the latter speaking in Lyon last month, during the presidential campaign. Opposite Jean-marie at the family home west of Paris last month
bedroom. Mementoes cover every surface (‘ There’s a machine-pistol here somewhere, but I’m not sure where it’s got to,’ he told one visitor). He does not rise as easily as he once did – hip problems have slowed him – but his physique remains bearish, and his mind sharp and relentless. It is here he is most at his ease, in this house (valued at around €9 million), and in particular in this study, with its maritime decor.
Model boats – their string rigging sagging with age – and a giant pair of mounted binoculars are reminders of the Le Pen family heritage–of Jean- marie’ s up bringing on the Breton coast; of Jean, his father, who was killed when his trawler, La Persévérance, struck a German mine in 1942, which resulted in Jean-marie being declared an ‘orphan of war’ and raised by the state. Today, the FN founder is as proud of his seafaring feats as of his political journey. ‘I am one of the rare politicians to have crossed the Atlantic and Pacific by sail, and led a movement for 40 years,’ he says. As for his childhood, and its sudden bereavement: ‘It toughened me; made me grow up.’
But the greatest declaration of his love of the sea is now absent in his life: Marine. Not that he calls her by her first name. When we talk, he refers to his youngest daughter, somewhat bizarrely, as Marine Le Pen, as though they barely know each other. ‘I don’t see her,’ he says. Yet he follows her rise with a mix of pride and envy. ‘Of course if she won, it would also be my victory. I think Marine Le Pen’s friends think this ascent to power is normal – owed to them. But it was I who organised the FN through the storms, always against the tide, never supported.’ Though their tone is different, he insists the essence of their political message is the same. ‘On the essential principles, she has the same point of view as me.’
She denies it. Where he talks of Europe being submerged by ‘a rising tide’ of Muslim immigration that ‘threatens the very existence of our continent, politically and culturally and legally’, she has said that it is ‘globalisation’s losers who are rising up against the established order, against mass immigration, the intolerable rise of inequality and the reduction of their power over the destiny of their nation’.
That is the nub of her strategy: appealing to the left as well as the hard right, reaching out to jobless former industrial workers who once voted like clockwork for socialists or communists, and whom she now hopes to haul in to her own political net, along with the old racists whom the party still undoubtedly attracts. Not that, according to her father, she is fooling anyone .‘ There are certain positions of the new Front which seem like positions of the left ,’ he says. ‘But the speeches of Marine Le Pen, and the positions she takes on television are, let me say, “‘Jean-mariste”.’
What does that entail? Nothing less than a clash of civilisations, the West against Islam. That, he says, is the single pre-eminent question for politicians today –‘ far more important than retirement age, social security, policy questions like that; all that’s secondary’.
Marine, alert, is careful to steer away from such incendiary terms. When one of her close advisors described French Muslims as ‘a powerful fifth column living here who could rise up at any moment against us’, she publicly denounced him. Like her father, she mentions ‘savagery’, but for her it is usually financial – the ruthlessness of unfettered globalisation. ‘Borders don’t exist for nothing,’ she insists. ‘They are thereto regulate exchanges between countries, whether it is of trade – or people.’
It is on this last subject, immigration, that JEANMARIE sees himself as the true progenitor of her political philosophy. ‘In political life, my girls all have the same ideas as me, there or thereabouts,’ he says. So does Marine agree when he likens Muslims in France to a ‘cancer’? Or refers to ‘Pakis’ in Britain who have profited from ‘too lax an immigration policy’ – the risks of which, he infers, Britain has finally woken up to by voting for Brexit.
It is true, she notes, that ‘the rejection of uncontrolled traffic of people, of waves of migration’ ,contributed to Brexit. But where he advocates a doom-laden nationalism to respond to‘ the rapid establishment of thousands of mosques’, she focuses positively on a ‘love of one’s country’. ‘It’s obvious,’ she declares, ‘that a popular movement, brave and liberating, is underway in the Anglo-saxon world.’ In her memoir, A Contre Flots (Against t he Tide), she goes further: ‘It’s not for France to submit to the values of Islam; it is for Islam to submit to France.’ Last autumn she was more explicit still. ‘The presidential election will be about a big choice: do we defend our civilisation, or do we abandon it?’
Though he talks provocatively of his admiration for Fillon, there is little doubt that Le Pen père would like Le Pen fille to become president in May, thinking her eventual triumph ‘possible but not probable’. While she is pinning her electoral hopes on ‘this liberating wind blowing in from Britain, currently picking up force in the US’, he thinks her greatest ally now would be a‘ particularly bloody terror attack – people who now feel unthreatened would feel suddenly encircled, in g rave danger. Marine Le Pen might appear like the saviour.’
‘ Hélas...’ he sighs. He will not get the chance to lend a hand. In 2015, a year after the demise of Artémis, the two of them underwent their most brutal, and to date enduring, bust up. On Thursday, 2 April of that year, Jean-marie took to the air waves to repeat his claim that the gas chambers were‘ a detail of history ’,a grotesque turn of phrase–so scandalous it has become known in French politics simply as ‘the detail’ – he first made use of in 1987. Marine, who helped out at the FN as a young woman, then trained as a lawyer, before returning to the party fold and taking its helm in 2011, had assiduously attempted to scrub away its stain. He immediately compounded his sin, repeating his
While she is pinning her electoral hopes on ‘this liberating wind blowing in from Britain, he thinks her greatest ally would be ‘a particularly bloody terrorist attack’
sympathy for Marshal Pétain, the wartime leader of Vichy France regarded as a Nazi puppet, and lashing out at Marine, then struggling to distance herself from his remarks. ‘One is only really betrayed by one’s own,’ he said.
The struggle would culminate several months later in his expulsion from the FN. He was then still its honorary president, and his defenestration was dramatic. For many, evicting him was the moment Marine Le Pen truly became the FN’S leader. Even so, she seemed to think that his remarks were little but calculated provocations. ‘He thinks that polemic is good for the movement,’ she told Le Figaro at the time. ‘I totally disagree with that.’
Here at Montre-tout, two years later, it is hard to tell where rabble-rousing provocation ends and Jean-marie Le Pen’s true beliefs begin. Perhaps they have, after all this time, blended seamlessly into one another. Certainly he disagrees with his daughter’s efforts to bring the FN into the mainstream. ‘I think Marine Le Pen should have done the opposite. She should copy Trump’s strategy, ride the wave of protest, sweep all before her, the establishment parties, the great media… Sweep it all away. You can’t negotiate in a storm like this, no. You have to ride the wave.’
Instead she has steered another course. And on the campaign trail it is clear it is working, that her efforts to sanitise her party’ s reputation are meeting with success. She is acclaimed by great numbers, not only white, who cry out her name without embarrassment: for them she is ‘Marine, President! Marine, President!’ For good and ill, she captivates the media and the public as no other candidate. Her shock of blonde hair stands out always at the centre of a dark scrum of cameras and microphones bigger than that around any rival. For example, at the Salon de l’agriculture, France’s biggest farming show and an essential stop-off for presidential hopefuls, she is both mobbed and utterly at her ease, exchanging hearty compliments with cattle breeders. She is, as one veteran reporter here tells me, ‘France’s biggest political star’.
This, then, is the great difference between father and daughter – he the great poison thorn in the side of French politics, ever-present but irredeemably toxic to the vast majority; she the conciliator, the calculator, rounding edges off a strident message to assemble the majority needed to become president. And in the confusion of bitterness, anger and pride that characterises their relationship, this at least is clear to Jean-marie. ‘If she campaigns as I did, she gets 25 per cent. But since her aim is to get 51 per cent, it’s clear she needs to change her tone.’ Not that he will change his. ‘I challenge anyone to find one anti-semi tic phrase in 60 years of political life. People say “the detail”. There’s nothing anti-semitic about “the detail”.’
The extraordinary thing about Marine’s high-tension relationship with her father is that, in the Le Pen family, it is absolutely normal. Marine’s mother, Pierrette, took flight from Jean-marie one day in 1984. Marine’s eldest sister, Marie-caroline, known as Caro, cut all ties with him in 1998, after committing the unpardonable sin of backing FN splittists who had rebelled against her father. They have not spoken in the 20 years since, though Jean-marie insists it is ‘because she behaved badly [over a property deal], and I took the decision not to carry on with her’.
Jean- marie claim she isn’ t in contact with Marion Maréchal- Le Pen, a FN star in her own right who is his granddaughter by Yann, the second of his three daughters. ‘I don’t see her or Marine,’ he says. Yet not long ago Marion and JeanMarie were thought to be close (‘It’s true that she is closer to me, politically,’ he says). Marion was even rumoured to call Jean-marie ‘Daddy’. And for the FN’S Catholic ultras, she was the figurehead of resistance to Marine’s tactical appeal to the left, which they considered a betrayal. Currently, however, Marion’s only ambassador to Montretout is Olympe, her
The girls expected their mother to come home. In fact, the next time they saw her, she was falling out of a French maid’s uniform, naked, in Playboy
two-year-old daughter, who is often looked after by Yann, who still lives on the mansion’s top floor.
The enduring appeal of Montretout is remarkable given the circumstances in which the family arrived. Until the night of 2 November 1976, the Le Pens lived at No 9, Villa Poirier, in southern Paris. Then, at 3.45am, an explosion ripped through the apar tment block and sheared off the entire façade. Eight-year-old Marine was woken, not by the noise but the cold of the winter night to which she was suddenly exposed. Yann, then 12, shouted at Marine to prevent her walking in her bare feet across the broken glass, and when their parents called up from their bedroom on the floor below, 16 year-old Marie-caroline shouted back, ‘Yes, yes, we’re here. We’re OK.’ There were no fatalities. And no one was ever charged with the crime.
‘From that moment,’ Marine Le Pen notes in her biography, ‘I have lived with the very real idea of danger.’ Teachers, no less than school mates, made their revulsion for the FN clear. But there was little time for self-pity. The explosion had left the family homeless; no landlord would rent them another flat. They were saved only by a freak sequence of events: the sudden death of Hubert Lambert, the childless scion of a family made wealthy by cement, who had left his fortune and his house – Montretout – to his political soulmate, Jean-marie Le Pen.
When the will was drawn up, it seemed entirely theoretical: Lambert was only 40, Le Pen six years older. But within months Lambert succumbed to cancer. His mother had died weeks before him, and so the Le Pens moved into a house t hat, accord ing to Oliv ier Beaumont, in his book Dans l’enfer de Montretout [In the hell of Montretout], st ill bore t he f lecks of blood on t he sheets and paintwork coughed up by their terminally ill benefactor. They inherited his furniture too – and money; no one knows for sure how much, but a very large sum, sufficient for Le Pen to dedicate himself henceforth purely to the Front National.
It was a mixed blessing. The more Montretout became a FN base, the less it was home. Jean-marie’s office was next to t he marital bedroom, and one day Pier rette was st ill under the covers when an FN confidant walked in. ‘Don’t mind me,’ he said. ‘I just need to wash my hands.’ It was a fluidity between public and private that led to the end of their marriage. Pierrette walked out, in 1984, with Jean Marcilly, a journalist her husband had invited in to write his biog raphy. The split was vicious and hit their daughters hard, but Marine suffered most. ‘I missed her so much – that physical contact with my mother – it actually made me sick,’ she wrote. ‘For a month and a half after she left I threw up ever y day.’ While her father busied himself with politics, she was neglected. ‘I’ve been a model in my daughters’ lives,’ Jean-marie said later. ‘Absent, yes. But a model.’
The girls expected their mother to come home. In fact, the next time they saw her, in 1987, she was falling out of a French maid’s uniform, naked, in Playboy – partly because she needed the money, but doubtless she wanted revenge. She got both, but at a cost. Her three daughters severed emotional ties to their mother and regrouped around their father. They hit back in the pages of Paris Match, where Marine, then 19, insisted that, ‘We can no longer call her our mother. It’s worse than if she had died.’
As they divorced, Jean-marie and Pierrette refused to see each other. So, according to Beaumont, when Jean-marie realised that she had walked off with his spare glass eye (he had a cataract in the 1970s and his left eye was removed), and he had his mother-in-law’s ashes, their respective lawyers had to perform a macabre exchange. Divorce would c ont i nue to hau nt t he fa mily. Despite t hei r Cat hol ic upbringing, all three Le Pen girls are divorced – Yann and Marine twice. Even Marion, the politically vaunted granddaughter, recently split up from her husband of only two years, Matthieu Décosse.
Yet, somehow, sent imentalit y mixes wit h t he v it r iol among the Le Pens. When Pierrette returned penniless and alone, 15 years after running off, Jean-marie found the goodwill to take her in and put her up in Montretout’s stableblock flat – one year after eldest daughter Caro left – despite the grumblings of his second wife, Jany.
Marine had also moved into Montretout’s stable block, and found herself living cheek by jowl with the mother she had so publicly renounced. (‘She abandoned me, but we don’t talk about it much. It’s better like that. I forg ive her. Today she is a wonderful grandmother and we try to make up for lost time.’) By then Marine also had a failed marriage behind her, to Franck Chauffroy, with whom she broke up when Jehanne, their eldest daughter, was 16 months old, and twins Mathilde and Louis just five months old. There would be another marital ‘casting error’, to FN campaigner Eric Iorio, in 2002. ‘It’s never been easy, being my boyfriend or husband,’ she admits in her memoir. ‘It’s not as though it’s straightforward for a man to take me home to introduce to his family.’
When that union ended, without children, four years later, Marine returned to Montretout, which she, in her turn, began to transform into a political headquarters. FN strategists plotting her assault on the most powerful office in the land could hardly believe it when they climbed up the stairs to her Montretout flat, above Sergent and Major’s kennels, to find the mayhem created by three young children filling a dreary, student residence, its mottled beige carpet unchanged for decades.
But then, neither Marine nor Jean-marie have ever been much interested in interior design. Montretout appears not to have had a lick of paint in 40 years, since the Le Pens first moved in. No wonder Jany eventually prevailed upon JeanMarie to move into her flat nearby. But he still uses the place as his office. Yann is still in the top floor. Pierrette is still in the stable block. And Olympe still comes to visit. And, as ever, it is Jean-marie, the eternal top dog, who has outlasted his male competition. ‘It’s true, I have lived in a very feminine world,’ he says proudly. ‘Really, I am a feminist.’
‘He is like a sultan in his harem,’ counters Pierrette, ‘and it suits him very well.’ But that harem is depleted. Caro has reconciled with her sisters, but not with him. And as for Marine, whom he so fondly called Marinou, and with whom he used to lead the dancing and singing long into the night at FN parties held at Montretout, she and her family are now elsewhere, with Louis Aliot, a former rugby player, who has two children of his own.
Jean-marie Le Pen, for so long the hard man of French polit ics, seems, for a moment, emotional when he talks about this fracturing of his household. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘without a doubt, I could reconcile with Marie-caroline. Yes. I will tr y to do that before I die. You mustn’t leave reg rets behind.’ As for Marine, who just weeks f rom now may be elected to the job to which he so long aspired himself, their dispute is different. ‘My fight with Marine was never personal; it was political,’ he insists. And for once it was not she who left his fiefdom. No. These days the boot is on the ot her foot. ‘It was she,’ he says, shaking his head, ‘who chucked me out.’
Jean-marie Le Pen, the eternal top dog, has outlasted his male competition. ‘It’s true, I have lived in a very feminine world,’ he says proudly. ‘Really, I am a feminist’