CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL: The Age of Le Pen.

Le Pen died in January at age 96, two weeks before Trump returned to office. Half a century ago, Le Pen called for an uprising against a dawning era of human rights, abortion, sexual liberation, transnational governance, and—above all—mass migration. He won the near-unanimous loathing of his country’s journalists and intellectuals, who accused him of racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism. For a time he was the most despised major politician in the West, rivaled only by Britain’s Enoch Powell. Not all of his views have been vindicated—far from it. But his general vision, which passed through Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul and Brexit on its way to Donald Trump, has triumphed. It is worth looking at what he got right and what he got wrong. By September 2021, when I spent an afternoon interviewing him at his house in Rueil-Malmaison, west of Paris, he recognized that he had been mistaken in some of his most passionately held positions. The same, of course, can be said of his critics. Though certain of their arguments were well founded, others were opportunistic inventions of a power structure that despaired of besting Le Pen in debate.

Like other populists he was a has-been by the time he really hit his stride. It’s amazing what a combination of longevity and precocity will do. When Le Pen was born in Brittany in 1928, Raymond Poincaré was France’s prime minister and Calvin Coolidge the American president. Le Pen was a child studying classics with the Jesuits in the 1930s, a teenager when his fisherman father died after his boat struck a mine in the 1940s, and a member of the National Assembly—elected for the Left Bank!—in the 1950s. A soldier, he was shipped to Vietnam in 1954, just missing the catastrophic encirclement of French troops at Dien Bien Phu, and to Algeria later that decade. Suppressing the anti-colonial rebellion there became his passion. In 1972, he co-founded the National Front, the political party he would lead till passing it to his daughter Marine in 2011. In 1976, an attacker blew up his house—a crime that was never solved. In the 1980s he became a member of the European Parliament in Brussels and spent more than three decades there—the longest-serving French member of a body he loathed. He started regularly taking 15% or so of the vote in presidential elections at home, and in 2002 broke through to the second round. Though he was defeated by Jacques Chirac, the slap to the three big establishment parties—Socialists, Gaullists, liberals—is still felt today. And today, the National Rally, as Marine Le Pen renamed her father’s party, is bigger than any of them. It is more popular, in fact, than any party in France, commanding a solid third of the vote and kept out of office only by ever-more-elaborate deals between the establishment parties.

There’s a lot of that going on in Europe, to keep the grift going before the lights (possibly literally) go out.