Marine Le Pen was overcome with emotion while attending the memorial service in honour of her father, far-right politician Jean-Marie Le Pen, in Paris today – days after she said she would ‘never forgive herself’ for kicking him out of the party he founded.
National Rally deputy Le Pen – the youngest of Jean-Marie’s three daughters – was seen sobbing outside the Notre-Dame Val-de-Grâce church, where a mass was held in her late father’s honour this morning.
Jean-Marie, a controversial figure in France who was known for his fiery rhetoric and Holocaust denial, died aged 96 on January 7 in a care facility where he had been for several weeks.
The founder and former leader of the populist National Front (FN) – which later became National Rally (RN) – handed the reins of the party over to his daughter in 2011.
She went on to expel her father from the party just four years later over a remark he made that the Holocaust – the systemic murder of millions of Jews by the Nazis – was a ‘detail of history’, comments he was also convicted over.
Less than a week after her father’s death, Le Pen told French newspaper told Le Journal du Dimanche that her decision to remove him from the party was one that ’caused him immense pain’.
She said that her father’s expulsion from the party was ‘one of the most difficult decisions of my life’, adding: ‘Until the day I die, I will always ask myself if I could have acted differently.’
Le Pen was buried at a private funeral in his hometown of La Trinité-sur-Mer in southern Brittany following his death last week.
The more public mass today saw hundreds of people gather to watch the event, which was broadcast to the public outside the Catholic church on a big screen.
Mourners dressed in black and French tricolours were waved, while an RN banner was hung on the railings.
Marine put her hands together in a show of gratitude for the huge crowd of supporters who had congregated.
There was a large police presence at the event, which was reportedly attended by Éric Zemmour and other far-right figures.
President Emmanuel Macron described Le Pen as a ‘historic figure of the far right’ and said that ‘history will judge’ his impact on France’s political landscape.
Macron’s political nemesis Marine, who led RN for years and n ow heads it up in parliament, said that it was ‘a little unfair to judge [my father] only in the light of these controversies’ that marked his life.
‘His political career spanned nearly 80 years and it was inevitable that there would be topics that created controversies, unless you were a sort of lightweight Sarkozyite [supporter of Nicolas Sarkozy, the conservative former president] or Socialist,’ she said. ‘What is unfortunate is that he got caught up in these provocations.’
Le Pen was known for his fiery rhetoric against immigration and multiculturalism that earned him both staunch supporters and widespread condemnation.
He shook the French political establishment when he unexpectedly reached the presidential election run-off vote against Jacques Chirac in 2002, a dramatic ascent many credited to his populist appeal and charisma.
His daughter has since run for the presidency three times and turned the party, now branded the National Rally, into one of the country’s main political forces.
Marine was not at her father’s bedside and received news of his death during a stopover in Kenya on her way back from visiting the cyclone-hit island of Mayotte, according to French media.
‘You will not be able to console me for this sorrow,’ she wrote in a tribute post on X alongside a black and white picture of her as a child being carried by her father.
