Marine Le Pen Struggles With Father’s Legacy

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/14/world/europe/marine-le-pen-struggles-with-fathers-legacy.html

Version 0 of 1.

PARIS — Marine Le Pen, who heads France’s far-right National Front party, prides herself on being a lawyer, and a media lawyer at that. So she has no doubt that chilling anti-Semitic statements made recently by the provocative comedian Dieudonné M’bala M’bala are actionable under a French law that bans hate speech.

“What he said against Patrick Cohen is against the law, and Mr. Dieudonné knows that perfectly well,” she said last week during a two-hour interview with the Anglo-American Press Association of Paris. “So he must assume the consequences, and he should be sanctioned.”

Speaking in the middle of France’s feverish debate over what to do with Dieudonné, as he is called, Ms. Le Pen’s view seems clear-cut. But the Dieudonné affair promises to be tricky for the National Front, as it dances tip toe around the legacy of Jean-Marie Le Pen, Ms. Le Pen’s father and founder of the party, known for his own coded anti-Semitic commentary, and his chummy relationship with Dieudonné.

There can indeed be no ambiguity about Dieudonné’s recorded remarks about Mr. Cohen, a French radio journalist: “When I hear him talking, I say to myself: ‘Patrick Cohen ... the gas chambers ... what a shame”’ he said on stage in a Paris theater on Dec. 19.

Yet over the last decade, legal sanctions have done nothing to stop Dieudonné. Convicted eight times for making defamatory and anti-Semitic statements, he has managed to avoid paying 65,000 euros in fines — €37,000 of which were final judgments — apparently by declaring himself bankrupt. And his show went on.

Then last week, the government stepped up its legal action by ordering a restraining order on Dieudonné’s latest show, “The Wall,” as it headed off on a countrywide tour. Performances in several French cities were canceled before Dieudonné announced he was halting the show to “conform to the rules of democracy, or what’s left of it.”

Like others across the political spectrum, Ms. Le Pen is strongly opposed to the ban, which she sees as a dangerous and legally doubtful use of prior restraint and censorship.

“If political authorities start to ban shows in advance, because statements could be made during the event that would be outside the law, that makes me very afraid,” she said. “It would be a totalitarian excess.”

The problem for Ms. Le Pen is not the law but her father, a garrulous 85-year-old whose shadow continues to hover over the National Front, even as his daughter tries to shift it away from its historic moorings in France’s hard-core anti-Semitic political right.

In her interview, Ms. Le Pen took pains to distance herself from the toxic comic. “Mr. Dieudonné has nothing to do with the National Front,” she said. “He’s never been a candidate; he’s not a member. I’ve never met Mr. Dieudonné, never.”

However, she didn’t deny that he is a friend of her father, who, by the way, is godfather to one of Dieudonné’s children. “One can have a friendship for someone without sharing their ideas, or being condemned in their place,” she added.

If only it were so simple. In fact, her father’s views are not so far from those of Dieudonné, particularly about the Holocaust, a regular theme of the comedian’s routine. Mr. Le Pen once famously dismissed the Holocaust as “a mere detail of history.” In 2012, an appeals court upheld a three-month suspended sentence and a €10,000 fine against Mr. Le Pen for his statement that the Nazi occupation of France was not “particularly inhumane.”

When she took over the party in 2011, Ms. Le Pen tried to bury her father’s views by declaring the Holocaust to be “the ultimate act of barbarism.” Her work to sanitize the party’s image may in fact pay off in 2014, when the National Front looks set to make significant gains in two key elections.

But it is more difficult for Ms. Le Pen to deny her father’s political legacy, which she selectively defends, or his supporters, whom she is careful not to alienate. She may not like her father’s friends, but she clearly can’t protest too much.