BLong beyond the fall, the image will be a landmark. Sunday November 12, among the hundred of thousands of people marching in Paris “for the Republic and against anti-Semitism”, Marine Le Pen, leader of the eighty-eight National Rally deputies, paraded, at the end of the procession, alongside Jordan Bardella, president of the RN, and elected officials from the far-right party girded with their tricolor scarves .
A “astounding presence”, estimated the same day in The world, the historian Grégoire Kauffmann, for whom “a glass ceiling has exploded”. “The incredible novelty, he emphasizes, it is of course the fact that the RN was invited to join the great Republican family” and this civic march launched by the presidents of the National Assembly and the Senate.
In a column published the next day, Solenn de Royer notes that “several political leaders”, including Edouard Philippe and Nicolas Sarkozy, have endorsed ” without a frown “ the presence of the RN. “Even if she has kept a low profile, Marine Le Pen can already reap political gains, analyzes the journalist, her political party having taken a further step in the demonization process that she has put in place. »
“Theoretical counter-offensive”
The word “demonization” appears for the first time in the pages of World on September 2, 1989. Under the pen of Olivier Biffaud, the neologism is accompanied by quotation marks, everything except a detail. “The National Front has been “demonized” for several years. He is now undertaking his “de-demonization”. This is, in essence, the message that the leaders of the far-right movement have been trying to convey to their executives since the start of the summer school they are holding in La Baule. summarizes the special correspondent in Loire-Atlantique. The concept was therefore created by the FN, ancestor of the RN. Bruno Mégret, then general delegate of the party, is one of the architects of this “theoretical counter-offensive”.
In his article, Olivier Biffaud does not recall what every reader of the time knows: Jean-Marie Le Pen, historic boss of the FN, aroused indignation in 1987 by describing the gas chambers as ” detail “ of the Second World War. Then, the following year, after his 14.5% in the first round of the presidential election, by reappointing a minister “Mr. Durafour-crematorium”. The journalist notes that, in La Baule, the leaders of the FN attacked “egalitarianism” and to the “pseudo-philosophy of the Enlightenment”.
The neologism disappears from the pages of the World until December 3, 1995. It will be used around thirty times over the course of the 2000s. At the helm, for more than a quarter of a century, of this vast enterprise of “demonization”, Marine Le Pen. In July 2002, after the shock of April 21 and the presence of her father in the second round of the presidential election, swept away by Jacques Chirac and the Republican front, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s youngest daughter took the helm of Generation Le Pen.
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