Jean-Marie Le Pen's legacy of provocation and controversy

FRANCE 24 English

Visit our website: http://www.france24.com  Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FRANCE24.English  Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/France24_en

Transcript

00:00Jean-Marie Le Pen was always approaching or even crossing political red lines.

00:05But in the early days of his political party, his provocations didn't resonate much.

00:09That all changed in the 1980s, when the National Front broke through electorally.

00:14In 1987, his denial of the Holocaust caused a scandal.

00:30After that shocking statement, an openly anti-Semitic remark.

00:34Le Pen directed an offensive pun at the public service minister,

00:37whose last name translates to oven.

00:44An ugly play on words that resulted in the loss of his European parliamentary immunity.

00:50His anti-Semitism reaffirmed in 2005, when he told a far-right magazine that

00:55the German occupation in France had not been particularly inhumane.

01:00As Le Pen aged, he was no less scandalous.

01:05In June 2014, he attacked artists speaking out against the national rally,

01:09including Jewish singer Patrick Bruel.

01:12And he used the word for batch, as in an oven batch of loaves.

01:18Le Pen's other obsession? The gay community.

01:20As the AIDS epidemic erupted in the 1980s, he proposed forcibly isolating people with AIDS,

01:26and used offensive language to describe victims.

01:30He used homophobic slurs to insult people as well, like in this incident in 1997,

01:43caught on camera in a Paris suburb during a scuffle with opposition activists.

01:48Le Pen was a frequent visitor to courthouses and convicted of several crimes,

02:04including inciting racial violence and justification of war crimes.

02:08And he never expressed regret for his remarks.

02:11On the contrary, in 2015, he repeated his claim that gas chambers were merely a detail of the war.

02:18Jean-Marie Le Pen

Category

Transcript

Recommended