The clan has driven French politics for half a century. Now the judiciary could draw a line in the sand.
Jul 6, 2026, 5:18 amJul 6, 2026, 5:18 am
Marine Le Pen at an election rally in Liévin on Saturday evening.Image: Firas Abdullah
On Tuesday, a Paris appeals court will decide whether Marine Le Pen’s conviction for embezzling EU funds in early 2025 was legal. If the verdict is confirmed, the previous favorite will no longer be able to run in the 2027 presidential election.
And the burden of evidence against the 57-year-old figurehead of the Rassemblement National (RN) seems overwhelming. Starting as the favorite in the polls, she will likely have to field her replacement, Jordan Bardella. That would be almost historic: an Elysée election without the name Le Pen had not happened in France since 1981. Jean-Marie Le Pen then ran four times, his daughter Marine three times.
If she cannot run for a fourth time in April 2027, it would probably be the end of a family dynasty that had more influence on French politics than any other political clan, even if no Le Pen ever made it to the Elysée Palace.
Villa Montretout – symbol and focal point of the Le Pen family
If there is a symbol of Le Pen’s rule, it is the Villa Montretout in the chic Paris suburb of Saint-Cloud. From your terrace you have a view over the capital. On the ground floor, patriarch Jean-Marie Le Pen received his visitors in an office overflowing with marching music records, two small sculptures by Hitler sculptor Arno Breker, photos and medals.
There was not a single medal awarded by the French Republic. The founder of the right-wing extremist Front National (FN), who died in 2025, was the flip side of the republic, its counterpoint. Here in Montretout he concocted his wild sayings about the gas chambers (“a detail of history”) and “racial inequality.” And here he made a name for himself when he showed his wife Pierrette in front of the door and recommended that she hire herself out as a cleaning lady – before she posed half-naked in Playboy with a washcloth and a vacuum cleaner.
Jean-Marie Le Pen, the patriarch, died in January 2025.Image: Etienne Laurent
How Le Pen came to Montretout is still not completely clear. In 1976, a wealthy sympathizer bequeathed the villa and a few more million to the leader of the Front National (FN). That wasn’t well received everywhere. In the same year, a nighttime bomb attack on the Le Pen family injured several people, including their daughter Marine. The assassins were never caught.
Thanks to the inheritance money, Jean-Marie Le Pen established herself at the top of the FN. His buddies, including Vichy collabs and a Waffen SS, had only given him a puppet role. Jean-Marie Le Pen’s anti-immigrant rhetoric steadily increased in the elections of the 1980s and 90s. In 2002 he even outperformed the socialist candidate Lionel Jospin in the first round of voting; Only in the runoff election did he lose to Jacques Chirac.
In 2011, his daughter Marine Le Pen replaced him. She transformed the ostracized FN into the softened variant RN and immediately threw his extremist father out of the party. The patriarch retired to Montretout, where he poisoned: “I wish that she takes off my name as quickly as possible.”
At the same time, he sent his favorite granddaughter Marion Maréchal-Le Pen from Montretout, who made life difficult for her aunt with her neoliberal and ultra-conservative positions. Meanwhile, the RN faction leader traveled to Israel and enlisted the support of Nazi hunters Beate and Serge Klarsfeld. And she suddenly said things like: “Islam is compatible with the Republic.”
Her foster son overtakes her
In Paris, the judicial noose tightened around Marine Le Pen. The favorite in all presidential polls then appointed her 27-year-old advisor Jordan Bardella as RN boss. He soon received higher approval ratings than Marine Le Pen. Today she seems haggard, her voice expresses bitterness. Certainly, she was successful with her tactics of republican salon ability. But now that she is standing at the gates of the Elysées, i.e. before the realization of her life’s work, her political foster son is overtaking her.
Everyone is still acting as if: Bardella is acting as if Le Pen will win the appeal process, and Le Pen as if she still has the strength to run for president. Is the fact that “Marine,” as her fans call her, not actually wanting to get into high politics coming to fruition today? Her father had chosen the eldest of his three daughters, Marie-Caroline, as Dauphine. Marine would have preferred to remain a lawyer to take care of underage criminals, as she had done in a law firm after her studies.
But the Pater Familias then opted for Marine. But now, thirty years later, with the judiciary breathing down her neck, her candidacy sometimes seems like a mandatory candidacy.
On the outside, one heart and one soul: Marine Le Pen (57) and her political foster son Jordan Bardella (30).Image: Firas Abdullah
Is the Le Pen political dynasty coming to an end? Jean-Marie Le Pen died in his villa in January 2025 at the age of 96. The family has also lost its center, the symbol of its former influence: in June, Marine and her sisters sold the Villa Montretout. The Le Pen clan is homeless. (schweiztoday.ch)