The man's face looked familiar to him, but Jean-Marie Le Pen couldn't exactly remember who he was. Even when he was told the new prime minister's name, Michel Barnier, Le Pen couldn't recall the slightest thing about his career. Nor could he even place him on the French political scene.
In front of him, the television was constantly on, blaring out programs from the BFM-TV and CNews news channels, but his visitors all cautiously admitted to the same observation: The former president of the far-right Front National (FN, now Rassemblement National, RN) party no longer seems to really understand the world around him, let alone the ups and downs of current events. Does he even remember the major events of his own political life? "The other day, when I was talking about April 21, 2002, he didn't even know [that was the day] he'd made it through to the second round of the presidential election," confided Lorrain de Saint-Affrique, Le Pen's loyal supporter for the past 50 years, who still takes once or twice a month to spend a couple of days with him.
At 96, the French far-right party's former leader usually gets up at around 3 or 4 pm and briefly walks, clinging to his caregiver's arm in the garden at La Bonbonnière, his house in Rueil-Malmaison, a chic suburb west of Paris, but doesn't go out beyond that. Since February, Le Pen has been under a "mandate of future protection," which gives his three daughters the right to supervise all his decisions.
He will not be appearing at the FN's trial concerning European parliamentary assistants, for which he was indicted for "misappropriation and complicity in the misappropriation of public funds," as he has been rendered exempt through two medical certificates certifying his impaired cognitive faculties and his inability to answer the judges' questions.
The few visitors he receives, former far-right figures and old friends, as well as his ex-wife, Pierrette, who has reconnected with him – but no journalist since 2023 – have all said more or less the same thing: Le Pen is now considerably weakened on an intellectual level. He can repeat ready-made phrases with a certain aplomb – "I see what's happening in the world..." or "You have to let things happen" – but the conversation rarely progresses any further.
The pre-WWII songs he likes to sing, some Latin quotations he still knows, and bawdy jokes that he still dares to repeat are like a mask. "He's still got some of the rhetorical elements from his past political life, a kind of reflex that can give the illusion for a few moments," said his youngest daughter, Yann, the only one of the three Le Pen daughters who agreed to talk to Le Monde about her father. "He's been performing for so long that it's as if he's still got that veneer. But, in reality, he's faking it."
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