The funeral procession wound through the village streets in La Trinité-sur-Mer, on the coast of Brittany. The hearse, at the head of the procession, was followed by a large cross, altar boys in cassocks and a Breton bagad orchestra, complete with binious and bagpipes, filling the air with music on this fine, dry winter's day. The procession of mourners, all dressed in black, was led by three sisters. Three women with greying blond hair. On this day, January 11, Marie-Caroline, Yann and Marine Le Pen buried their father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who had died four days earlier.

The man who had resurrected the French far right was to be laid to rest in the place where he was born, in 1928, when this seaside resort village was still just a modest fishing port. Le Pen, who, right up to the age of 96, was convinced that "the future always begins tomorrow," had not written up his last wishes. His daughters, therefore, imagined this procession "in Papa's place." It seemed straight out of a bygone age of village culture and triumphant Catholicism.

A few dozen onlookers scrutinized the mosaic of parading faces. Television cameras did so, too. The Le Pen family is used to being exposed. Their far-right Rassemblement National party (RN, known as Front National, FN) had also commissioned a team of videographers to immortalize the ceremony, as a form of conclusion to the first volume of the party's history – the toughest one to bear. In the 1980s, the three sisters had been used as a backdrop for their father's political communication, to give a softer, more glamorous image to the elder Le Pen, a man who had founded the FN in 1972 alongside neo-fascist militants, activists nostalgic for French Algeria, former collaborators from the Vichy regime, and ex-Waffen SS members.

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