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Report
Jean-Marie Le Pen's legacy of provocation and controversy
FRANCE 24 English
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1/7/2025
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Transcript
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00:00
Jean-Marie Le Pen was always approaching or even crossing political red lines.
00:05
But in the early days of his political party, his provocations didn't resonate much.
00:09
That all changed in the 1980s, when the National Front broke through electorally.
00:14
In 1987, his denial of the Holocaust caused a scandal.
00:30
After that shocking statement, an openly anti-Semitic remark.
00:34
Le Pen directed an offensive pun at the public service minister,
00:37
whose last name translates to oven.
00:44
An ugly play on words that resulted in the loss of his European parliamentary immunity.
00:50
His anti-Semitism reaffirmed in 2005, when he told a far-right magazine that
00:55
the German occupation in France had not been particularly inhumane.
01:00
As Le Pen aged, he was no less scandalous.
01:05
In June 2014, he attacked artists speaking out against the national rally,
01:09
including Jewish singer Patrick Bruel.
01:12
And he used the word for batch, as in an oven batch of loaves.
01:18
Le Pen's other obsession? The gay community.
01:20
As the AIDS epidemic erupted in the 1980s, he proposed forcibly isolating people with AIDS,
01:26
and used offensive language to describe victims.
01:30
He used homophobic slurs to insult people as well, like in this incident in 1997,
01:43
caught on camera in a Paris suburb during a scuffle with opposition activists.
01:48
Le Pen was a frequent visitor to courthouses and convicted of several crimes,
02:04
including inciting racial violence and justification of war crimes.
02:08
And he never expressed regret for his remarks.
02:11
On the contrary, in 2015, he repeated his claim that gas chambers were merely a detail of the war.
02:18
Jean-Marie Le Pen
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