Every French person has at least one Jean-Marie Le Pen story. I have two, both of which long predate my scholarly interest in France.
The first goes back to when I was around six or seven, spending the summers with my aunts, uncles, and cousins in a large house in Haute-Provence in the late 1980s. During one of my stays, my closest cousin, who was only a year younger than me, informed me that “Le Pen” was a gros mot — a swear word. Given the way everyone used “Le Pen” as a vague form of insult, this seemed plausible to me, and I must have believed her for a few days. Eventually, she informed me that “Le Pen” was not, in fact, a swear word but the name of a politician. This led to many jokes at my expense, and perhaps also a little sympathy for my childish naivety.
My second story relates to that fateful day — April 21, 2002 — when Le Pen made it through to the second round of the presidential election. As it happens, this was the very first election in which I was entitled to vote, but I had not been able to do so because I was traveling abroad (the French do not allow postal voting). I learned of his shock success while having a greasy breakfast in a roadside café in New Zealand, more than 18,000 kilometers away from Paris. When I walked angrily out of the café, I vowed I would never abstain from an election again.
Looking back, the striking thing about my two Le Pen stories is just how universal they are. I suspect there are plenty of French people who think of Le Pen as a gros mot — and I am definitely not the only French person to have vivid memories of April 21, 2002. The sophisticated electoral estimations done by pollsters mean that the results of almost all French elections are known the very second that polls…
Auteur: Emile Chabal
