During the tribute ceremony to resistance fighter Missak Manouchian on Wednesday at the Pantheon in Paris, Marine Le Pen thought it right to recall her father’s past in the Foreign Legion, including that during the Algerian War.
What followed was an avalanche of criticism and reminders of some not-so-good truths to hear about Jean-Marie Le Pen’s service record, notably his past as a torturer during the Algerian War.
Despite opposition from part of the political class, including President Emmanuel Macron, Marine Le Pen took part in the tribute paid in France on Wednesday, February 21 to Missak Manouchian, a great foreign resistance fighter (Armenian) during the Second World War.
The opposition to the presence of the former president of the National Rally is explained by the inadequacy between the ideals of the pantheonized character and the ideology of the far-right party founded 50 years ago by Jean-Marie Le Pen.
“This pantheonization will be an opportunity to remember that being French does not depend on origin, religion, first name, but on will,” the Elysée indicated in a press release.
Missak Manouchian was a communist activist of Armenian origin executed by the Nazis with 23 other foreign resistance fighters in 1944.
During the ceremony, Marine Le Pen declared that she too has “family ties with the Foreign Legion”.
“You know, I have some family ties to the Foreign Legion. So, that foreigners have come throughout our history to fight to defend our country is obvious,” she told France Info. The allusion is obviously to his father’s passage in this corps of the French army.
France: Jean-Marie Le Pen’s past in Algeria resurfaces at the Pantheon
Except that Jean-Marie Le Pen belonged to the Foreign Legion when it was engaged in the repression of liberation movements, particularly in Indochina and Algeria, precisely between 1953 and 1957. Which is the polar opposite of Missak Manouchian’s fight.
During the Second World War, Jean-Marie Le Pen was “deputy of a Poujadist movement oozing anti-Semitism”, recalls Libération. Between 1953 and 1957, the Foreign Legion “was stuffed with former Nazis recycled in the defense of the colonies”, adds the newspaper for which Ms. Le Pen’s remarks are a way of congratulating herself on “the active commitment of her father against the liberation movements of the Vietnamese and Algerian people.
In Algeria, where he took part in the Battle of Algiers with the 1st Foreign Parachute Regiment, Jean-Marie Le Pen is accused of acts of torture.
One of his accusers, the French writer Fabrice Riceputi, author of the book “Le Pen and Torture, history against Oblivion”, also went there to “explain it”.
For him, Marine Le Pen’s link with the Foreign Legion is her father’s commitment to his paratrooper regiment in which “he practiced torture” in Indochina and then in Algeria.
Fabrice Riceputi recalls the anecdote of the “Hitler Youth dagger engraved with his name” that Lieutenant Le Pen “lost in the house of one of his victims, Ahmed Moulay” in Algeria.
In his reaction on the X platform, the writer assumed that this dagger had been given to him by one of the German soldiers engaged after the Second World War in the Foreign Legion. They numbered 30,000 including 3 to 4,000 SS, he recalls.
Riceputi adds that in 1957, Le Pen was a lieutenant in Algiers where he met “certainly the former SS Frtuz Feldmeyer, all-purpose executioner of the Villa Sesini”, a place of sad memory who served the 1st Parachute Regiment alien from PC and torture center.
Update after Marine Le Pen’s remarks at the Pantheon, during the tribute to Manouchian.
