Since the establishment of the Fifth Republic in 1958, there had been 6 presidential elections using direct suffrage. In 5 of these elections, the two candidates remaining in the second round represented the largest political right-wing and left-wing parties (the election of 1969 was an outlier, as the opponent of right-wing Georges Pompidou was Alain Poher, a centrist from a minor party). Mitterrand had run in 4 of these elections, Chirac and Giscard d'Estaing in 2 each. So, just like the US had Democrats vs Republicans, and the UK had Labour vs Tories, France had (moderate) Left vs (moderate) Right, often with the same candidates, and this had been the case for more than 30 years. It was a given that any presidential election would feature the two candidates offered by the mainstream parties, and that the winner would get something like 51-55% of the votes. France was split into two blocks of more or less equal size, who differed in their political culture: on the left, one inspired for the most part by Marxism, communism and socialism (but much water-downed); on the right, a conservatism much inspired by Gaullism. Candidates from the far-left and the far-right would show up in the first round, get a few % and disappear until the next election. The presidential election of 2002 shattered this model.

The post-WW2 épuration - the forceful elimination of Vichyite collaborationists – had resulted in the almost total destruction of the French far-right and its ideologies. Fascism was no longer fashionable. What was left of its supporters went under cover for a decade. It only resurfaced in a significant way in the mid-1950s, with the start of the Algerian war. The defense of the Algérie Française was not limited to the far-right but, along with the fight against Communism, it was used as a rallying point for a younger generation attracted by ethnonationalism. Far-right youth movements – Occident, Ordre Nouveau - emerged in the 1960s, fighting their left-wing nemeses in the streets with pickaxe handles and brass knuckles, like the Camelots du Roi had done in the 1930s. However, street brawls, while fun, were hardly useful to get to power: in the early 1970s, the leaders of Ordre Nouveau found it more promising to play the electoral game. They created a new party for this, the Front National, and chose Jean-Marie Le Pen to run it. At 44, Le Pen was already an old figure of the far-right. Eyepatch notwithstanding (his own brawling days were over), he was considered as a moderate in the far-right spectrum if you compared him to the violent activists of the Ordre Nouveau (which was banned in 1973 after another riot). In the late 1950s, he had been a minor politician whose populist platform was dedicated to the defense of the small business owner (poujadisme). Both as a NCO during the Algerian war and as a politician, he had been active in the opposition to the decolonisation of Algeria (though not a member of the terrorist OAS). In addition to his political experience, he was a good speaker, and he was well connected. In 1972, his career was on a lull, and he had become himself a small business owner who sold historical records - including those of Nazi songs.

The early Front National was something of a Frankenstein monster of a party, made of discarded parts found in the trash heap of populist and far-right ideologies. There were hardcore Christians (Catholic traditionalists) and Neopagans, actual Nazis (Pierre Bousquet, one of the founders, had served in the Waffen-SS) and former Resistance fighters (like Georges Bidault), libertarians and statists, fascist revolutionaries and Vichyite conservatives, nationalists and partisans of a unified Europe, anti-communists and anti-capitalists, Americanophobes and “atlantists”, people nostalgic of French Algeria (and of the French Empire), and the usual strains of xenophobes, anti-immigrant extremists, antisemites, racist ideologues, white supremacists etc. Le Pen had to federate a myriad of little cultish groups who hated each other as much as they hated their stated enemies. And this did not work at first. For more than a decade, the Front National remained a niche party without a clear political line, whose members regularly quit to form their own far-right groupuscules. Le Pen’s first presidential election was catastrophic (0.75% of the votes in 1974) and he could not find the necessary sponsorships to run in 1981.

In the late 1970s, the end of the Trente Glorieuses - the thirty years of economic growth that followed WW2 -, the rise of unemployment, and the new visibility of immigration from North Africa, started to give ammunition to the far-right, and Le Pen capitalized on this. He also benefitted from the failure of the “socialist” François Mitterrand in 1981 to implement actual socialist policies, and from the perceived corruption of the post-Gaullism embodied by Jacques Chirac. The Front National, despite – or thanks to - Le Pen’s occasional verbal provocations (usually of the antisemitic/Holocaust denial kind), started making progress, at first in local elections. Le Pen professionalized the structure of his party, streamlined its propaganda (he took inspiration from Reagan), and established the Front National in the political and media landscape. In the early 1980s, some in the mainstream right were not opposed to occasional collaboration with the Frontistes: if the Socialists collaborate with the Communists, they said, why cannot we work with the Front National? As for Mitterrand, he has been widely accused of deliberately helping Le Pen to gain prominence so that he could steal votes from the mainstream right. In any case, a change in electoral law in 1986 resulted in Front National members being elected in the National Assembly.

During the next twenty years, the Front National strived to turn itself into a legitimate political party, and it mostly succeeded. Though dominated by its immovable and virile Menhir, it had a solid cadre of national and regional leaders. Its propaganda focused obsessively on immigration and crime, but it also reframed the party as being “neither left-wing or right-wing, just French”. By the mid-1990s the Front National had captured a good chunk of the vote of disenfranchised populations – factory workers, unemployed people... – who until now had been voting for the Communists or the far-left. On 1st May 1996, the banners shown at the Front’s “Joan of Arc” rally had very left-wing slogans such as “Let’s defend the public services”, “Raise the minimum wage to 7000 Francs” and “Social is Front National”. But, at the same time, Le Pen doubled down on extremist and racist rhetoric, possibly to keep his base of xenophobic nationalists happy, and likely because he truly believed it.

As a result, despite its local prominence, the Front National kept hitting a glass ceiling – about 15-16% - at national level: traditional parties maintained a safe distance, within a cordon sanitaire, and the moderate right now refused to form alliances with a party whose leader was an unpalatable loudmouth. Any regular politician willing to talk to him was accused of dealing with the devil. Le Pen was the Voldemort of French politics: his influence was huge and nefarious (see the Lepenisation des esprits, how his ideology was contaminating the public discourse) but nobody knew what to make of him and how to handle his voters. Ignore them? There was a deep disconnect between the actual political weight of Le Pen and his lieutenants at local level, where people voted for them for various complicated reasons, and the refusal from the rest of the political class (and the media) to see the Front National as anything else but a bunch of racist thugs. This also weighed heavily on some Front leaders, for whom Le Pen was starting to look like a liability. In 1999, Le Pen’s second-in-command and potential successor Bruno Mégret left the Front National with his own lieutenants to create his own party, one that would be outside the cordon sanitaire.

Three years later, in 2002, the situation of the Front National was not a good one: an aging leader mostly known for his Holocaust denial “jokes” and racist outbursts, and a divided voter base. Mégret’s plan did not work either as he failed to steal extra voters from the mainstream right.

-> Part 2