Front National

For the British party, see National Front. Other uses, see National Front (disambiguation).

Front National
Political position	General: Indigenism Social: French nationalism Fiscal: Economic nationalism
Leader	Jean-Marie Le Pen (1972—2010) Marine Le Pen (2010—2018)
Country	France
Existence	1972–2018
Affiliation	Alliance of European National Movements
Colours	Blue, white, red
Website	FrontNational.com

The Front National (also known as the FN) was a French nationalist party founded in 1972. The party grew primarily out of an earlier patriotic movement known as Ordre nouveau. Most of its history since its founding in 1972, has been under the leadership of founding chairman Jean-Marie Le Pen, however his daughter Marine Le Pen took over the role in 2010. In 2018, the party was renamed, reorganized and reclassified as Rassemblement national. From a political analysis perspective, it is actually impossible to equate the two parties, as is often done by legacy media, due to serious differences.

History

The FN was born out of the second congress of the Ordre nouveau (New Order) movement on 10/11 June 1972, when it was decided to create a party to participate in the 1973 legislative elections. The party was formally announced on 5 October 1972, under the name of Front national pour l'unité française (National Front for French Unity), called Front National. Jean-Marie Le Pen became its first and only president until this day, while François Brigneau, former member of Marcel Déat's National Popular Rally (RNP) Roger Holeindre, a former member of the OAS, Jean-Pierre Stirbois and François Duprat, formed the Bureau national (National Office). Others founding members include Roland Gaucher (1919-2007), also a former member of Déat's RNP, and Jacques Bompard, former supporter of the OAS.

The party didn't have any relevant electoral successes until the beginning of the 1980s, in part because of competition from the Parti des forces nouvelles (PFN), an off-shoot created in November 1974 from National Front members opposed to Le Pen. However, in 1983, Jean-Pierre Stirbois gained one of the first victories for Le Pen's party, scoring 16.7% in the Dreux by-election. During the June 17, 1984 European elections, the party obtained 10 seats. The FN then gained 35 seats in the March 16, 1986 legislative elections, taking advantage of the new proportional ballot, which president François Mitterrand (PS) had imposed in order to moderate a foreseeable defeat by the right-wing RPR, headed by then mayor of Paris Jacques Chirac. The RPR won anyway, and Mitterrand nominated Chirac as Prime minister, setting up the first cohabitation between the two main political parties in France, the PS and the RPR, in the executive, since the 1958 founding of the Fifth Republic. Furthermore, some hard-liners in the FN spin-off to create the French and European Nationalist Party.

In 1988, Bruno Mégret became the general secretary of the FN, overshading Jean-Pierre Stirbois, who died the same year. Carl Lang and Bruno Gollnisch were then promoted by Mégret to senior levels within the party. Royalists such as Michel de Rostolan, Thibault de la Tocnaye and Olivier d'Ormesson also joined the FN in the 1980s, seeing in it a continuation of the Action Française royalist movement.

The crisis in the 1990s

During the nineties a debate over strategy within the FN led to a growing division between those who wanted to affirm the continuity with a fascist past, and those who wanted alliances with sections of the traditional Right. This came to a head in 1997-8. Several traditional Conservative leaders showed they were willing to have alliances in the context of regional councils. The result was a series of demonstrations against these leaders, mostly organized by the "Manifeste contre le Front national". Faced with this kind of publicity, the Conservatives moved away from the FN. The result was a crisis in the FN which led to a split.

Supporters of Le Pen and of the "national-conservative" tendency (Roger Holeindre, etc.) opposed "nationalist revolutionaries" closer to Bruno Mégret and Third Position ideologies [1]. The split between Mégret and Le Pen started on 16 July 1997, during a FN meeting near Strasbourg. Roger Holeindre, vice-President of the FN, initiated the hostilities against Mégret by criticizing "ideological racialism" theories supported by FN members close to the Nouvelle Droite and former members of the Club de l'Horloge . He also advocated a return to more "paternalist" approaches of immigration issues, in the French colonialist tradition [2]. Along with Samuel Maréchal, Marine Le Pen, Jean-Claude Martinez, the Catholic current represented by Bernard Antony and Bruno Gollnisch, and Martine Lehideux, Roger Holeindre was part of the "TSM" current (Tout sauf Mégret, Anybody But Mégret).

In December 1998, Bruno Mégret, at that time still number two in the FN but under attacks by inside members since July 1997, quit the party to found what would become the National Republican Movement (MNR). The "Megretist crisis" has led to an Ubuesque situation, in which Le Pen and Mégret fought for the legal right to use the name "Front National." Just before Mégret filed with the sous-préfecture of Boulogne-Billancourt the name "Front national - Mouvement national" (cancelled by the courts in May 1999), Le Pen filed (on 27 January, 1999) articles for the creation of an association "Front national pour l'unité française" (National Front for French Unity). However, both figures were outraced by the legal owner of the appellation "Front national," which was the name of a resistance, and therefore anti-fascist movement created in 1941 by Communists, and which also gathered Catholics and religious people. Along with René Roussel, currently responsible for the legacy of the Resistant Front National, the satiric weekly Charlie Hebdo deposed the FN name to the INPI (Institut national de la propriété industrielle, the institution responsible for brands) on 18 December, 1998 (explaining why neither the FN nor the MNR could simply call themselves "Front National"), with the intention of giving the name back to its original owners. Thus, legally, the FN is not named "Front National," an appellation reserved to the original Front National. At the Liberation, after the deportation and death of many of the members of the clandestine direction, the FN resistant movement counted as members such figures as Frédéric Joliot-Curie, Pierre Villon, Henri Wallon, Laurent Casanova, François Mauriac and Louis Aragon..

After the 2002 presidential election

A year after the 2002 presidential election, in which Le Pen succeeded in getting in to the second round against Jacques Chirac, Le Pen appointed his daughter, Marine Le Pen, to the executive of the party. In 2004, opponents of Le Pen in the executive such as Jacques Bompard, mayor of Orange, the largest town administrated by the FN, and Marie-France Stirbois (who particularly opposed Marine Le Pen's nomination, which they saw as the establishment of a "Le Pen dynasty") were steered away from the center of power. This led Jacques Bompard to join Philippe de Villiers' Movement for France (MPF), a reactionary party which has similar ideas to the FN and a similar voting base, and hence represents the FN's main rival party for the 2007 presidential and legislative elections. Several former FN members have joined it, including the FN's only two mayors. Carl Lang tried to bring them back into the FN, by inviting in 2001 members deceived by the MNR to join again the FN. The MNR, however, has allied itself with the FN in view of the 2007 presidential election (and, even more, of the legislative elections), thus making de Villier's MPF the main competition.

Policies

The National Front posted a comprehensive political platform on its website. Amongst other things it argues for:

• A return to traditional values: to include making access to abortion more difficult or illegal; giving an income to women who do not go out to work; promoting certain local traditional culture.
• Greater independence from the European Union and other international organizations.
• The establishment of tariffs or other protectionist measures against cheap imports.
• Reinstatement of the death penalty.

The party opposed mass immigration, particularly Muslim immigration from North Africa, West Africa and the Middle East. In a standardized pamphlet delivered to all French electors in the 1995 presidential election, Jean-Marie Le Pen proposed the "sending back" of "three million non-Europeans" out of France, by "humane and dignified means". It was also anti-communist and pro-European.

In the campaign for the 2002 French presidential election, the stress was more on issues of law and order. Recurrent National Front themes include tougher law enforcement, higher sentences for all crimes and the reinstatement of the death penalty.

The Front National regularly campaigned against the "establishment", which encompasses the other political parties and most journalists. Le Pen lumped all major parties (French Communist Party (PCF), French Socialist Party (PS), Union for French Democracy (UDF), Rally for the Republic (RPR)) into the "Gang of Four" (an allusion to China's "Cultural Revolution"). According to the Front National, the French right-wing parties are not true right-wing parties, and are almost indistinguishable from the "Socialo-Communist" left.

EU issues

The Front National was also one of several parties that backed France's 2005 rejection of the Treaty for a European Constitution. In Le Pen's opinion, France should not join any organisation that could overrule its own national decisions. The FN is the leading member of Euronat, which gathers the most radical "euronationalist" parties. In the European Parliament, it was part of the non-inscrits parties until 2007, when it managed to set up an alliance with other euro-sceptic and nationalist parties, thus reaching the minimum number of MEPs necessary to make up a group for the pruposes of the Parliament's standing orders, dubbed Identity, Tradition, and Sovereignty and led by FN member Bruno Gollnisch.

Positive culture

The General Inspection of Libraries made a report, directed by Denis Pallier, at the request of the Minister of Culture, in particular concerning the management of Marignane's and Orange's public libraries. Such libraries depend, in France, on the municipal council, and hence on the mayor, who is responsible for their management.

A propaganda campaign was launched because in 1996 the FN mayor refused to force the taxpayers to fund subscriptions to extremist Marxist newspapers, L'Événement du Jeudi, Libération and La Marseillaise. Similar books with subversive anti-French themes and Cultural Marxist positions were refused to be acquired. At the same time, positive cultural and patriotic books were acquired from Editions Elor and Présent publishers. There was much whining from the pseudo-French forces which control the state, because they are used to the boot being on the other foot.

Persecution by "French" authorities

In post-WWII France, freedom of speech is heavily restricted and French political dissidents are often openly persecuted by the state, the power of which is largely in the hands of barely concealed communists, the Grand Orient freemasons and Jewish supremacists. One such Orwellian attack on freedom of inquiry is the 1990 Gayssot Act which declares that French people are not allowed to hold a different view of World War II history to the state and if they do, they can expect prison and hefty fines for daring to have a different opinion.

In 2005, Jean-Marie Le Pen was persecuted and forced to pay 1.2 millions Francs (183,200 Euros), for saying in the newspaper Rivarol that the Germans hadn't treated the French people particularly inhumanely during the occupation. Another FN member Bruno Gollnisch was condemed to a political-gulag for three months on probation and fined 55,000 Euros for saying that historians should be able to investigate if homicidal gas chambers were used during World War II or if the Kabbalistic "6 million" death toll figure is accurate.

Leadership

Jean-Marie Le Pen has led the party since its foundation. Other major members are:

• Bruno Gollnisch, general delegate of the Front national
• Carl Lang, general secretary
• Roger Holeindre, vice-president, and a former member of the OAS

Other prominent members include:

• Marine Le Pen, Jean-Marie's daughter, who campaigned in the 2004 regional elections in the Île-de-France région

Electoral successes

Municipalities

The Front National (FN) has been elected in several municipalities, typically where there is unemployment and tension between local people and immigrants. The party has tended to cut back on social services for immigrants as well as cultural activities deemed "anti-family" or "multicultural." Spending has been redirected to the municipal police and other services.

One of the party's earliest successes came in the city of Dreux, when in 1983 they won the city council and deputy mayorship, amid rising unemployment.

The FN collegial lists won three cities during the June 1995 municipal elections, all in the southern Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region, in a political context of triangulaires ("triangulars," opposing a left-wing candidate to a conservative candidate and a FN candidate). Jacques Bompard, former member of the national direction of Occident and of OAS, was then elected mayor of Orange, one of the FN's major city, in 1995 (his list making a score of 33% at the first turn and 36% at the second, and reelected in 2001. He then left the FN, to take membership in 2005 in Philippe de Villiers's Movement for France (MPF). Daniel Simonpieri won in Marignane, with 33% at the first turn and 37% at the second turn, and Jean-Marie Le Chevallier won in Toulon with 31% at the first turn and 37% at the second turn. Two years later, in 1997, Catherine Mégret, the spouse of then general delegate Bruno Mégret (who was ineligible) won at the first turn, with an absolute majority (52.48%) the partial municipal election of Vitrolles, Bouches-du-Rhône.

The FN's management of these towns became controversial, amid liberal economic policies (In Orange, Jacques Bompard reduced school spending by 50%, while in Vitrolles, lead by Catherine Mégret, 150 civil employees were fired, while the police force was expanded from 34 to 70 officers), corruption and even censorship in public libraries. In Vitrolles, the party sought to give 500 euros to the families of each French baby born (in accordance to the FN's policy of "national preference" (préférence nationale), which is supposed to favorize the Français de souche (despite that more than a quarter of the French population has foreign origins) but was unable to do so for constitutional reasons.

Electoral alliances

The FN has made some electoral alliances with other patriotic parties between 1977 and 1992. The RPR condemned them in September 1988, as did the Parti républicain latter do in 1991. Regional alliances (Charles Millon, leader of La Droite) were then sometimes passed.

2002 presidential election

In the 2002 presidential election many commentators were shocked when Jean-Marie Le Pen gained the second highest number of votes, and thus entered the second round of voting. Almost all had expected the second ballot to be between Jacques Chirac and Lionel Jospin (the PS candidate). This result came after the election campaign had increasingly focused on law and order issues, with some particularly striking cases of juvenile delinquency catching the attention of the media, and low voter turnout. Furthermore, Jospin had been weakened by multiple candidacies from his own political block. The election brought the two round voting system into question as well as raising concerns about apathy and the way in which the left had become so divided. After huge demonstrations against the FN, Chirac went on to win the presidency in an overwhelming landslide (83%), aided by ubiquitous support in the media and academia, while Le Pen's constituency was either ridiculed or ignored by the French press. Jospin himself urged voters to choose "the lesser of two evils". The day of the election, France's most popular national newspaper, Le Monde, featured a front page article entitled "Chirac, bien sûr" ("Chirac, of course").

2007 presidential election

Before the 2007 presidential election, Jean-Marie Le Pen and Bruno Mégret, who had split to create the rival party, the MNR, agreed to ally again in order not to lose votes to internal disputes. However, Le Pen still trailed in fourth place behind Nicolas Sarkozy (31%), Ségolène Royal (26%) and François Bayrou (19%), with only 11% of the vote.

Name change

In late 2017, Florian Philippot left the FN and formed "The Patriots", on the grounds that the FN had "softened" its position on leaving the EU and abandoning the Euro.

At the conclusion of the 11 March 2018 party congress in Lille, Marine Le Pen proposed renaming the party to Rassemblement national (National Rally) while keeping the flame as its logo. The new name was put to a vote among all party members.[28] Rassemblement national had already been used as the name of a French party, the Rassemblement National Français, led by the radical-right lawyer Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour. His presidential campaign in 1965 had been managed by Jean-Marie Le Pen. The name had also been used by the FN previously, for its parliamentary group between 1986 and 1988. However, the name change faced opposition from an already-existing party named "Rassemblement national", whose president, Igor Kurek, described it as "Gaullist and republican right": the party had previously registered its name with the National Institute of Industrial Property in 2013. On 1 June, Le Pen announced that the name change was approved by party adherents with 80.81% in favour.

During that party congress, Steve Bannon, former advisor to Donald Trump before and after his 2016 election, gave what has been described as a "populist pep talk". Bannon advised the party members to

"Let them call you racist, let them call you xenophobes, let them call you nativists. Wear it like a badge of honor. Because every day, we get stronger and they get weaker. ... History is on our side and will bring us victory."

In January 2019, ex-Sarkozy minister Thierry Mariani and former conservative lawmaker Jean-Paul Garraud, left Les Republicains (LR) and joined the National Rally.

External links

• Front National at FrontNational.com
• True Fascists of the New Europe by Pat Buchanan