TRUE OR FALSE. Is the National Rally the heir of Waffen-SS and the Vichy regime, as LFI MP Sarah Legrain asserts?

While the far right is getting closer to power, after the decision announced on Sunday by Emmanuel Macron to dissolve the National Assembly, the left is worried about the normalization of the National Rally. “Today we have in the country a part of the bourgeoisie, which until now called itself republican, also sometimes a part of the media field, which is entirely ready to conceive that the National Rally comes to power”, indignant MP La France insoumise Sarah Legrain, Tuesday June 11 on LCI, saying they were ready “to formulate the idea that Hitler is better than the Popular Front”.

To justify this comparison between the National Rally and the German dictator, the member for Paris invoked the history of the political party: “Am I saying that the National Rally is a party which is the heir of Waffen-SS who founded it and the heir of Vichy? Yes of course!”she said. “It’s a serious statement”reacted Christophe Moulin, journalist and presenter at LCI.

She is not the only one to make such comments: in 2023, Elisabeth Borne, then Prime Minister, recalled that the RN was “Pétain’s heir”. So, what is the MP referring to? Franceinfo takes stock.

The genesis of the National Front is no secret: it has been widely documented by historians. It was on October 5, 1972 that the National Front for French Unity was born, a heterogeneous alliance of small far-right groups around the figure of Jean-Marie Le Pen. The veteran of the Algerian War was chosen by Ordre Nouveau, a movement of young neofascists, to take on the role of unifying leader, with a view to the 1973 legislative elections.

It is about presenting a more civilized image of the extreme right, which remains discredited at this time. “We were really in a totally uninhibited verbal violence. We wanted to ‘kill the metics’, ‘assassinate the communists’…”, recalls historian Valérie Igounet on the subject of New Order, to France Culture. On the advice of an executive of the Italian neofascist party MSI, François Duprat, one of the executives of New Order, begins to practice “a smiling fascism“, explains Nicolas Lebourg, historian, to franceinfo.

“In the 1960s and 1970s, in the midst of the Cold War, all the far-right ideological families came together in violent anti-communism”, explains Magali Balent, doctor in political science and lecturer at Sciences Po Paris, to France Culture. The new alliance is made up of three political tendencies: the national-populist family, the neofascists and the collaborationists. The first is worn by Jean-Marie Le Pen. Marked by decolonization and the events of May 68, it includes people nostalgic for French Algeria, some of whom are involved in the Organization of the Secret Army (OAS), such as Roger Holeign. New Order constitutes the second. The movement wants the abolition of political parties, or even elections if it gains power.

The third component is that mentioned by Sarah Legrain: those nostalgic for the Second World War, and more precisely for the Collaboration. In 1972, Jean-Marie Le Pen submitted the party’s statutes to the prefecture alongside Pierre Bousquet, Waffen-SS within the Charlemagne division. He will occupy the position of treasurer. Also alongside them, François Brigneau, journalist and former Pétain militiaman, is appointed vice-president.

Questioned about Pierre Bousquet by franceinfo, on the occasion of the party’s 50th anniversary, Jean-Marie Le Pen does not condemn him: “We were thirty or forty years away from the war and, consequently, the options that people who were 60 years old had been able to take at 20 years old were not the main criterion.he explains today. The affairs of Algeria were closer than those of the Second World War.”

“Mr. Bousquet had no scandalous stories, for the good reason that he had no stories.”

Jean-Marie Le Pen

at franceinfo, in 2022

Pierre Bousquet left the party eight years after its creation, at the same time as another ex-Waffen-SS, Jean Castrillo. Despite this, there was “many members of the New Right and the FN” at the funeral of the former treasurer in 1991, reports historian Nicolas Lebourg on Slate.

Léon Gaultier, another co-founder of the party, was also involved in the Waffen-SS. Supporting photo, he spoke of his past in a report by “Envoyé Spécial” broadcast on Antenne 2 in 1992: “Yes, that’s me in an SS uniform, a uniform that I wore for more than two years, because I was a volunteer in the Waffen-SS, which was dependent on the German army, but which did not ‘wasn’t the German army’, he detailed. Jean Marie Le Pen founded Serp with him, a publishing house which notably published a disc of songs from the Third Reich.

“In political terms, the former SS played an essential role in the reconstruction of the extreme right after the war., estimates historian Nicolas Lebourg. In view of all the currents present at the creation of the FN, it is therefore correct, as LFI MP Sarah Legrain does, to affirm that the ancestor of the RN comes from a heritage linked to the Waffen-SS and the Vichy regime.