Jean-Marie Le Pen has died, aged 96, on the same day that France solemnly honored the victims of the Islamist terrorist attack on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo ten years earlier. Charlie Hebdo had once tried to have Le Pen’s party banned for its alleged racist and anti-Islamic views. Shortly before Le Pen’s death was announced on Tuesday, a survivor of the massacre at Charlie Hebdo, cartoonist Coco, reminded the French that “only the right and the extreme right” still take a firm stand against Islamism. She said in an interview with Le Figaro newspaper that the left had abandoned “what should be the fight of all republicans.”

Le Pen died at a clinic near Paris “in the presence of his nearest and dearest,” according to his family. He cut a strange figure in French politics when, in the early 1980s, he happened upon the stage of mainstream media and politics. Before 1981, the year socialist François Mitterrand came to power, Le Pen had been the victim of an unofficial boycott — newspapers, radio, and television stations judged his views on immigration and race beyond the pale.
However, Mitterrand, at the extreme opposite of Le Pen’s views, persuaded the main radio and television broadcasters to stop silencing his adversary. After all, he himself had complained of censorship by the Right during the presidency of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing (1974-1981).
Mitterrand’s gesture was not totally magnanimous, however, as Le Pen’s rising popularity weakened Mitterand’s other right-wing opponents: conservative parties whose voters deemed their leaders too soft on the socialist-communist government that had started the legalization of illegal migrants on a grand scale. Voters who preferred Le Pen’s uncompromising stance.
As a result of Mitterrand’s service to free speech, viewers and listeners were treated to the sight of a loud-mouthed provocative politician lambasting the quasi-official government doctrine that favored multiculturalism.
Le Pen surprised, or appalled, viewer...