Starting with Jean-Marie Le Pen may seem strange. After all he is no longer leader of the Front National (which is no longer called the Front National), he is an elderly man and his political career is over. And yet, it all starts with Jean-Marie Le Pen. When Le Pen formed the FN the Second World War had been over for less than 30 years. It was 1972 in fact, the last gasp of the immediate postwar era. It was the end of the boom years (the “thirty glorious ones” as the French refer to them) and just one year before the oil shock of 1973, which would mark the end of Europe’s most prosperous era.

The FN would come to provide the bridge between the old extreme right (still tainted by Nazism and fascism) and the new right-wing populism of the twenty-first century. By 2002, Le Pen had made it all the way to the second round of the French presidential elections (narrowly beating Socialist candidate Lionel Jospin to second place with 16.86% of the vote – Jospin had scored 16.18%). It took 30 years, but in those three decades Le Pen rewrote the gamebook for challenger parties on the right and shaped contemporary populism. In Le Pen’s formulations and behaviour we can detect the beginnings of a powerful appeal to transparency and to a new form of authentic politics.

The Front national: prototyping contemporary populism

The year 1972 was not Le Pen’s first foray into politics. After a brief stint in the National Assembly (in 1956 as an MP for Pierre Poujade’s Union de Défense des Commerçants et des Artisans (UDCA) – an early populist precursor), Le Pen momentarily faded from view and, in 1962, the new, Fifth Republic swept away the relics of the Fourth and its institutions were kind to no one but its Gaullist architects. The next few years would bear the hallmarks of this deep political transformation: the Algerian war, decolonization, the rise of Gaullism and its struggle to impose order on the French party system. De Gaulle opened up France, but he was a man of his time: government’s role was to rein in chaos.