The memorial for Jean-Marie Le Pen, who was known for his racist and antisemitic remarks, comes as the National Rally has become the driving force in French politics.
Hundreds of mourners flocked to Paris’s venerable Val-de-Grâce church on Thursday to pay their final respects to Jean-Marie Le Pen, the architect of France’s modern far-right movement who was known for his racist and antisemitic remarks.
A speaker at the requiem Mass praised Mr. Le Pen, saying he had “perceived, before all others, the dangers that threaten France today.” A choir sang a French military song asking God for “the ardor to fight.” The crowd repeated the words of a prayer to Joan of Arc, with its plea that “the people of France will always be a Christian people.”
But since Mr. Le Pen’s death on Jan. 7 at age 96, the question of how much respect he deserves in death has ignited a passionate debate in France, given Mr. Le Pen’s long history of alarming comments, his trivialization of Holocaust horrors, and his assertion that Germany’s occupation of France had not been “particularly inhumane.”
Questions about his legacy reflect broader, unresolved tensions over the party that Mr. Le Pen co-founded in 1972, the National Rally. The party has in recent years moved from the fringes to the center of French politics and currently holds the largest number of seats in the National Assembly.
Yet despite their recent success, leaders of the National Rally regularly complain that they are still denied “respect” from fellow lawmakers, are locked out of policy debates and snubbed for leadership positions.
Their peers can be blunt. In a TV interview earlier this week, François Rebsamen, the minister for regional planning and a leftist in the current center-right government, declared, “I respect all political forces, except the National Rally.”