Building a sympathetic fascist: this was the mission entrusted to Pascal Humeau, image consultant in charge of Jordan Bardella’s media training by the National Rally (RN). It was at the beginning of summer 2018. The objective: to de-demonize the extreme right.
The political organization had just changed its name, from Jean-Marie Le Pen’s “front,” which connoted charge and confrontation, to his daughter’s “rally,” evoking solidarity and strength in numbers. But a name is nothing if it is not embodied in flesh — and that’s where Jordan Bardella, a young leading man with slicked-back hair, to whom journalist Pierre-Stéphane Fort has just dedicated a book after an investigation he devoted an entire year, enters the scene.
While the extreme right is today on the way to foiling Emmanuel Macron’s disastrous bet of dissolution, The great replacementpublished by StudioFact on June 9, is timely. The journalist rigorously dissects the RN’s communications machine and demonstrates that candidates and parties are like brands: behind their success, there is a colossal amount of work branding.
When Pascal Humeau began coaching Bardella in 2018, the spokesperson for the National Rally was only 22 years old. Florian Philippot had spotted him four years earlier: the ideal son-in-law type, who expressed himself well, he represented the perfect vehicle for de-demonization. At the beginning of his training, Bardella “was an empty shell. He didn’t read books or the press, didn’t get informed. He was a machine for spouting Marine’s language elements.” Humeau first taught him to smile, a challenge for the one nicknamed “the young cyborg.” Then, when it became natural, he tackled the “narrative.”
If Bardella was considered so promising by Marine Le Pen at the time, it was because he was her useful complement: he was a young man from the suburbs. His was not violent, but in his constructed speech, it became so; there was no trace of his father, who worked in an SME and gave him a Smart for his 19th birthday. Jordan Bardella became the man who went into politics at 16 because he saw “his mother end the month with 20 euros”, the man who had “experienced mass immigration, insecurity, delinquency, Islam”.
This story, likely to generate support from the working classes, the RN’s core target, he will tell it hundreds of times, with the results that we know, first in the 2019 European elections, then in the first round of the 2024 legislative elections, on June 30.
The wolf with long teeth
But what about Bardella’s ideologies? “He goes with the flow,” the one that allows him to rise, several of his former colleagues confided to the author, some of whom have tasted his propensity to “brutally get rid of collaborators he has grown tired of.”
Taking care not to assert that the politician also uses his partners (his former best friend, Aurélien Legrand, will say “that it comes to him”, and Florian Philippot that “being part of the family [Le Pen] “necessarily helped him”), the investigative journalist also highlights the links between Jordan Bardella’s meteoric rise within the party and his private life.
When he was made spokesperson in 2017, he was dating Kerridwen Chatillon, the daughter of Marie d’Herbais and Frédéric Chatillon, who is close to the Le Pens and co-founded the Groupe union défense (GUD), a far-right supremacist organization known for its beatings. Then, when he became president of the party, Bardella was in a relationship with Nolween Olivier, the niece of Marine Le Pen, daughter of his sister, Caroline, and Philippe Olivier, “today the all-powerful man at the RN.”
While it would be inappropriate to “blame Jordan Bardella for the ideas of his girlfriend or his ex-father-in-law,” “the sometimes intimate company of radicals, members of the xenophobic, racist, anti-Semitic, violent, fascist, neo-Nazi extreme right, does not seem to bother him,” writes Fort, who also explores what is hidden behind the image by counting Bardella’s votes.
Say white and make black
“Manipulation today is made easy, especially through social networks,” the journalist told me in a telephone interview. Bardella says blank to seduce the electorate, but votes the opposite in Parliament.” While he brings out the feminist violins in a video broadcast in 2023, Bardella votes “systematically against texts denouncing the situation of women in Poland.” Then, when he has to vote on a text that aims to “strengthen the application of the principle of equal pay between women and men” or a resolution that “reminds us that there is no place for hatred, racism and discrimination against LGBTIQ+ people in our societies,” he abstains.
Asked directly by Fort about his more identity-based sensibility, his popularity among Zemmourists and his use of the term “great replacement”, Bardella remains evasive. Bad for the image. He also takes care not to tell him “that he has surrounded himself with a team with a strong identity-based leaning”. His chief of staff, François Paradol, was a community manager at e-Politic for a long time, when the company “belonged to Alex Lousteau and Frédéric Chatillon”, the Gudiste named above. As for his political advisor, Pierre-Romain Thionnet, he “claims Renaud Camus […] as one of his mentors.
Pierre-Stéphane Fort told me that he was not surprised by the trajectory and results of the RN. On the other hand, he was astonished by the dissolution of Parliament, just as he had been by the depth of Bardella’s image-building work: “I had not imagined that he had been taught to smile. He is probably not the only politician to have suffered this media training […]. I was surprised by the artificial side of the Bardella character.” But it is clear that the sauce has taken hold in the media.
“Jordan Bardella has benefited from immense media exposure,” he continues. “In 2022, he was on the radio or TV every three days. No other political figure has had such media exposure, apart from the President of the Republic — and even then. There are questions that we must ask ourselves as journalists regarding the visibility that we give to representatives of the extreme right,” some sections of whose discourse have already made their way to us.