On Aug. 3, 1957, a caravan of military trucks came to a halt in front of Paris’ Notre-Dame Cathedral. The parade of vehicles had inched its way from the south of France to the capital city, plowing along despite the oppressive summer heat. At each stop along the way, the former military men leading the movement projected a short film for curious onlookers. The images were hard to watch: They showed grainy footage of violent actions committed by Algeria’s anti-colonial rebels, the National Liberation Front (FLN), against French soldiers. On the sides of the trucks, banners were draped. “Algeria is France,” one read. On another: “Abandoning Algeria is national suicide.”
After the convoy arrived at its destination in front of the famous and symbolic cathedral, a young man descended from one of the vehicles into the crowd of gathered press. Photos show the man, wearing the full-body jumpsuit of a paratrooper, strutting past the cameras with a distant, determined look on his face.
Jean-Marie Le Pen, 29 years old at the time, was not yet a nationally recognizable politician whose trajectory would irrevocably change France. He was a relatively unknown lawmaker and a combatant fresh from a stint in colonial Algeria, where his country was pushing back the FLN in what would later come to be called the Battle of Algiers, a gruesome fight over many months, marked by guerrilla bombings by the FLN and brutal reprisals against the Algerian population by French troops.
Le Pen’s caravan had garnered significant press as it made its way across France. Organized by the National Front of Combatants (FNC), a veterans’ association Le Pen had just founded, the movement was financed by pro-French Algeria ultranationalist groups. In some ways, it was this odyssey that launched the ambitious Le Pen — one of the youngest deputies in France’s National Assembly — into the national spotlight for the first time.
Le Pen had put his young political career on hiatus to fight against the anti-colonial movement in Algeria at that crucial juncture in the war. Though he spent just 10 weeks there, his counterinsurgency experience — and the sting of French defeat several years later in 1962 — was crucial in the making of the five-time presidential candidate and his far-right National Front (FN) party, which he helped co-found in 1972. That party, which has since been renamed the National Rally, or RN, today controls 124 seats in France’s 577-seat Parliament and won 41.5% of votes in the second round of the 2022 presidential elections.
“These are the real roots of the new French-style fascism introduced by the Front National in the ’70s,” Fabrice Riceputi, a French historian and the author of “Le Pen and Torture: Algiers 1957, Memory Versus Forgetting,” told New Lines: “The defense of French Algeria.”
In the Algerian War — the last gasp of France’s colonial empire — Le Pen saw a political opening for the French hard right. The fight to maintain the colony consolidated what was once a constellation of fringe far-right groups into a unified political movement, and brought the National Front, which borrowed its tricolor logo in the shape of a flame from Italian Fascism, a new civilizational mission: preventing the Arab invasion.
Forty-five years after his march on Paris, Le Pen, now head of the National Front, sent shockwaves through France during the 2004 presidential race when he nudged out former Prime Minister Lionel Jospin in the first round of the vote. Le Pen’s breakthrough challenged the long-standing view that he was a fringe politician, and set up a duel with the incumbent Jacques Chirac in France’s two-round system.
It was in this peculiar context that the story of Le Pen’s 1957 deployment to Algeria came roaring back to life. The night before the second round, the French daily Le Monde published a series of investigations titled “Revelations on Le Pen, Algerian Torturer.”
The Le Monde journalist Florence Beauge traveled to Algiers, where she interviewed Mohamed Cherif Moulay, an Algerian electrician who, at 12 years old, had witnessed Le Pen and his men in action. One night, the paratrooper burst through the door of his family home, searching for a relative; instead, they found his father, whom they forced to drink soiled water before shocking him with electric currents until he succumbed and died, in front of his child.
Moulay’s story had previously been told in the pages of the newspaper Liberation but, on the eve of the election, Beauge went a step further. As well as interviewing additional witnesses, she published a long interview with Moulay himself, who in the aftermath of his father’s murder by Le Pen had found a remnant of the paratrooper’s fateful passage: a dagger in the model of those used by the Hitler Youth, with the words “J.M. Le Pen 1er REP” (First Foreign Parachutist Division) engraved on the handle. Le Pen, Moulay concluded, had “blood on his hands.”
To Riceputi, the dagger remains a key piece of physical evidence of Le Pen’s use of torture in Algeria and symbolizes the mark he left on both countries. He told New Lines that in France today the foundation of the National Rally is often understood through its “ties to the neo-Nazi Waffen SS, its collaborationist ties to the Vichy regime, but we tend to forget this considerable moment” — the Algerian War.
Riceputi argues that Le Pen’s roughly three-month deployment to Algeria and participation in the widely documented cruelty that took place during the Battle of Algiers may have been a mere “detail” in the broader conflict — a nod to Le Pen’s own reference to the Nazi gas chambers as a “detail” of history. But for the young Le Pen, he adds, “it was clearly not one in his political biography.”
In Algiers, Le Pen actively participated in French “intelligence gathering” efforts — tactics that closely resembled modern counterinsurgency efforts, including so-called “enhanced interrogation” methods designed to weed out terrorist networks.
Le Pen was a regular at the Villa Sesini, a French military barracks located in a Moorish Revival-style villa that doubled as a torture center for Algerian “subversives.” It was here that Algerians suspected of participating in terrorist actions were held for long periods in underground, isolated detention cells, a practice the French called “la mise au tombeau” – or “entombment.” This was the case for Abdennour Yahiaoui, who claims he was tortured at the age of 17 with electricity and “entombed” by Le Pen.
Le Pen has downplayed the allegations of torture, suing almost any journalist or media outlet who claimed he had participated in it, including Le Monde. In a 1984 television interview, Le Pen obliquely responded to accusations of torture by calling them “necessary” violent actions “imposed by the military and political hierarchy” in response to “FLN terrorism.”
This rhetorical balancing act was no accident. During those months, the paratrooper — who had previously served in French Indochina and, at 16, had tried unsuccessfully to join the French Resistance — would have most likely seen himself not as an oppressor but as a “patriot,” said John Veugelers, a political sociologist at the University of Toronto and the author of “Empire’s Legacy: Roots of a Far-Right Affinity in Contemporary France.”
For Le Pen, “this was another version of the war against the Outsider,” Veugelers told New Lines. “It was the Germans in World War II. In the ‘50s, it was the Algerian independence movement, which wanted to cut off a part of France from the Metropole.”
In late March 1957, Le Pen was honorably discharged in a ceremony at the Villa Sesini. Le Pen has never publicly said why he didn’t serve the full six months’ leave he had been granted from the National Assembly, but some believe that he may have been discharged to avoid political scandal at a time when French torture in Algeria was under heavy scrutiny.
Le Pen was sent back to France a hero. After his French Algerian caravan in summer 1957, Le Pen rejoined the assembly, where he immediately tried to pass an amendment to the French Constitution that would revoke citizenship from “terrorists.” Three years later, in June 1960, his FNC — the veterans’ association that had organized the caravan — was replaced with the National Front for French Algeria. Le Pen dissolved this group a year later when a pro-French Algerian paramilitary group called the Secret Army Organization, the OAS, started conducting terrorist attacks against Algerians on French soil.
By then, France’s hold on Algeria was already slipping. For Le Pen and his contemporaries, who had invested so much in the movement to keep Algeria French, the 1962 signing of the Evian Accords, which ended the war, felt like an amputation of sorts.
“Algeria’s independence, and the political victory of the FLN, [were] an absolutely monumental defeat” for them, Riceputi said. “They very quickly switched gears to a new colonial talking point: that of the ‘submersion’ by the colonized.”
That idea, that France would be invaded and smothered by its former colonized populations, was and still is an effective talking point for the French far right. (Today’s “Great Replacement” theory, developed by the French intellectual Renaud Camus and used as justification for Islamophobic hate crimes around the world, including the Christchurch shooting in New Zealand, owes a lot to this rhetoric.) With the loss of Algeria, the existential battle against the supposed Arab Muslim “invader” in French Algeria was simply turned inward, to mainland France, Riceputi explained.
“It was at this point that the French far right, which since 1944 had been tainted by collaborationist infamy, obsessive antisemitism and so on, began to make a comeback,” Riceputi said. “That’s how it managed to regain its political health and mutate. It began to replace the ‘stateless Jew’ with the Muslim Arab.”
“We placed so much hope in French Algeria,” Le Pen himself said. “We would have made a national revolution to forge new and different men. … Our defeat has, instead, left the doors open to the barbarians who are flocking to us.”
Le Pen took the mission he had set himself in Algiers back to France with him. In 1972, he co-founded the National Front for French Unity, or National Front for short, a political party that brought together various far-right groups and political movements, including the neo-Nazi New Order, hard-line nationalists and Algerian War veterans.
To Veugelers, “the Algerian War was crucial [in the making of the FN] because it brought together a constellation of different political tendencies.” Le Pen, while not the most ideologically extreme, was nonetheless unique in his ability to unite these different groups, Veugelers noted. “If you look at his trajectory through the 1960s, into the 1970s, he is a guy who better than anybody else is able to hold together these different tendencies,” he said.
The party initially flopped, winning just 0.5% of votes in the 1973 legislative elections. But it began to gather steam in the late 1970s, as the French economy reeled from the global energy crisis. In 1978, the National Front ran its first ideological breakthrough campaign, pioneered by the party’s second in command, Francois Duprat: “1 million unemployed is 1 million immigrants too many!” read a banner at many FN rallies.
This “strategic reorientation” toward nativist and anti-immigrant rhetoric was highly successful, said Ugo Palheta, a scholar of fascism at the University of Lille in northern France. “Le Pen, afterwards, recycled that campaign and reinvested it in colonial categories from his own experience, in Algeria in particular,” he said.
The centering of the Algerian in this narrative was by design. Through the image of a violent, lazy Algerian immigrant, Le Pen and his National Front co-founders sought to “gradually build up the fundamentally foreign and hostile character of North African immigrants to French, European, and Western civilization,” Palheta added.
French Algerians felt particularly targeted by the early iterations of the National Front. “They were always talking about Algeria,” Nassera Dutour, a French-Algerian human rights activist told New Lines. “It was either about Algeria, or about immigration in general, about the Algerians who chased [the French] out and then followed [them] back here.”
Dutour was a child during the Algerian War but she remembers its horrors clearly. She recounted how nearly a dozen of her father’s siblings were rounded up by OAS terrorists and publicly hanged in the town square of their village near Oran. The bodies were left there as a warning to the population for several days, she said.
In 2024, the modern-day RN’s rhetoric may have softened but the anti-Arab and anti-Algerian sentiment that underlies it remains, Dutour said. “They’ll say: ‘We have to ensure that France stays French,’ or that social services are reserved for ‘real French people,’” Dutour said. “It’s still the same talk.”
To Veugelers, Le Pen’s messaging — developed in the ‘50s and ‘60s in Algeria and means-tested in the ‘70s and ‘80s in France — still resonates with many French voters today.
“Putting down Arabs and Muslims was not new in French society,” he said. “Doing it in politics the way he did was.”
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