How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

by Jason F. Stanley

Le Front National is France’s extremist far-right party, and the first neofascist party in Western Europe to achieve significant electoral success. Its original leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, was convicted of Holocaust denial. Le Pen’s successor as leader of Le Front National is his daughter, Marine Le Pen, who finished second in the French presidential elections in 2017. The role of the French police in rounding up French Jews to be sent to Nazi death camps under the Vichy government is well documented. But during the 2017 election campaign, Marine Le Pen denied French complicity in one particularly large roundup of French Jews, in which thirteen thousand were gathered at the Vélodrome d’Hiver cycling track and sent to Nazi death camps. In a television interview in April 2017, she said: “I don’t think France is responsible for the Vel’ d’Hiv….I think that, generally speaking, if there are people responsible, it’s those who were in power at the time. It’s not France.” She added that the dominant liberal culture had “taught our children that they have all the reasons to criticize [the country], and to only see, perhaps, the darkest aspects of our history. So, I want them to be proud of being French again.”