De mortuis nil nisi bonum dicendum est isn’t how the Nouveau Partie Anticapitaliste have decided to mark the death of French fascist Jea-Marie Le Pen. Here’s my translation of their piece on the brute. In the Frenchest thing ever they are having celebratory apéritifs in a number of towns.

Even in death, Jean-Marie Le Pen can embody nothing other than racism, colonialism, anti-Semitism, homophobia and misogyny.

He single-handedly summed up the French far right for decades: from those nostalgic for the OAS and French Algeria to Nazi and anti-Semitic ideologues, through racism and the most ordinary horrific machismo.

Our first thoughts are with his direct victims, the Algerians killed and tortured during the war of independence. And to his indirect victims, to all the people who have had to suffer racism, discrimination, injustice and even insults and physical attacks. And there are many of them, his victims, as he has contributed to unleashing racism, to constantly putting it back at the heart of the political debate… until he reached the second round of the presidential election in 2002.

Jean-Marie Le Pen dead, it was bound to happen one day. On the other hand, his ideas are very much alive. One only has to read Éric Ciotti’s tribute to be convinced of his poisonous legacy: “he sounded an early warning about  mass immigration and its ravages”. 

Today, his daughter, nearly 15 years after taking the reins of the party that Le Pen senior founded, is at the gates of power. 89 RN deputies entered the National Assembly in 2022, and 130 in 2024. And they set the political agenda of governments that yesterday chased the votes of the FN and the RN, from Balladur to Sarkozy, and today vote the same way as them, from Borne to Barnier. And, who knows, tomorrow, Bayrou…

The new Prime Minister also sees in Le Pen “a figure of French political life” before adding “We knew, by fighting him, what a fighter he was”, while the Élysée Palace hid behind a press release calling for the judgment of history.

Our judgment is made. Marine Le Pen pretended to put aside the anti-Semitism of her father, who in 1987, in a nod to his fellow Holocaust deniers and Nazis, had presented the gas chambers as “a detail of the Second World War”, to replace it with a new Islamophobia, allowing racism to be brought up to date with this facelift. It hasmade racism acceptable to the bourgeoisie and its political personnel.

Jean-Marie Le Pen is dead, but the foul beast is very much alive. We have fought the father and his friends for decades; we will continue to fight his heirs.

Note on the translation: there is a play on words in the French text which doesn’t work in English. See if you can do any better.

 “Passer l’arme à gauche » literally means “pass the weapon to the left” but means something like “kick the bucket”. It seems easier to leave it out of the body of the text since the reference to the NPA being offended makes no sense in English, even if it’s quite clever in French.

Il est peut-être la seule personne de qui on ne dira pas qu’elle « a passé l’arme à gauche ». 

Ce serait nous faire offense.

He is perhaps the only person who will not be said to have “passed the gun to the left”. That would be an offense to us.