Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the French far-right Front National (FN) and father of the party’s current leader Marine, died on 7 January aged 96. The self-confessed torturer (“I have nothing to hide, I tortured because it was necessary”) whose methods during the Algerian war of Independence included interrogation with electric shocks, has been relegated to the status of a mere “detail of history” as he once memorably described the Holocaust.

Le Pen’s torturing is well documented as was his Holocaust denial. He repeatedly talked up the credibility of so-called historians who questioned the numbers killed, denialist literature was on sale at party conferences under his leadership and in 1989 he received one of his many racial hatred convictions for invoking conspiracy theories of Jewish control attacking a “Jewish international” that was supposedly stoking “anti-national sentiment”.

Nor was there any repentance later in life. Last year, while claiming he was too fragile to appear in court in the trial over FN embezzlement of EU funds, Le Pen was still well enough to be filmed singing along to a fascist anthem with a neo-nazi rock group, one of whom was wearing a pro-Hitler youth T-shirt. (Le Pen’s daughter Marine claimed that the group had taken advantage of her father’s frailty and dementia.)

That there is no positive case to be made for Le Pen in a personal or political capacity has not stopped an immediate wave of cloying tributes from fascists, conservatives and liberals alike.

His daughter and successor Marine Le Pen stated that she would never be able to forgive herself for expelling her father from the party, which she did in 2015 in a bid to modernise, shear off FN’s nazi edges and present it as a party of government. That she could do this publically is indicative of how far her father has been rehabilitated. Tributes flooded out from virtually every member of the Rassemblement National – the new name for FN – all praising Jean Marie for his vision in “opposing mass immigration” and his leadership of their party.

Perhaps more surprisingly, tributes also flowed from the political mainstream.

Ignoring any of the substance of his life and work, hard-right Interior Minister Bruno Retaillau offered his thoughts to the Le Pen clan and paid tribute, posting on X/Twitter: “Today, a page of French political history is turning. Whatever one’s opinion of Jean-Marie Le Pen, he will undoubtedly have left his mark on his era.”

Prime Minister Francois Bayrou, a self-declared centrist, went so far as to praise Le Pen, saying: “Beyond the polemics which were his preferred weapon, and the necessary confrontations over the political substance, Jean-Marie Le Pen has been a figure of French political life. We knew in fighting him what a fighter he was.”

Not only did members of the Macron government praise Le Pen and offer up mawkish tributes, but they also castigated those who had the temerity to celebrate his death by letting off fireworks in the Place de la Republique. Retaillau criticised those partying for “dancing on a corpse”  while government spokesperson Sophia Primas said that even “political opponents” must be offered dignity.

The mealymouthed tributes of the Macronists, the undiluted praise of the far right and the official government condemnations of the jubilant left are all indicative of how radically French politics has shifted towards the reactionary right over the last decade.

Although in death Le Pen has received his final rehabilitation from the centrists, his ideas have been resurfacing in the mainstream for some time. The FN was founded not only by Le Pen but by Pierre Bousquet, a member of the SS and Leon Gaultier who participated in the Vichy government which collaborated with the Nazis. Where Vichy apologia had previously been relegated to Le Pen’s reactionary fringe, it has crept ever closer to the mainstream in recent years.

Far-right politician and columnist Eric Zemmour has attempted to rehabilitate the collaborationist government in a best-selling 2014 book, Le Suicide Francais. He argued that although it was antisemitic, the Vichy government only targeted foreign Jews, while trying to protect French ones – an argument also made repeatedly by Jean Marie Le Pen. In reality, the Vichy regime deported over 75,000 Jews to the camps. The eminent historian of the Vichy government Robert Paxton responded that all the evidence suggests that the regime’s antisemitism was indiscriminate.

Throughout the course of his political career Le Pen made the argument that Marshall Petain, the leader of the Vichy regime, was not a traitor, that he was the shield (trying to protect France), to Charles de Gaulle’s sword (actively resisting Nazi occupation). In 2023 then Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne criticised Marine Le Pen on the grounds that she was the inheritor of Petainism. Macron rebuked her a few days later in a cabinet meeting, saying that he wanted to “reintegrate Petain into national history” and that he was against criticising the RN on “historical or moral grounds”.

In 2017 Macron was denouncing Marine Le Pen in TV debates as “hate-filled” and casting her as the enemy of republican values, by 2024 he was implementing policies her father would approve of – such as the National Preference policy which created a two-tiered welfare system discriminating against non-EU migrants. Although the sanitising of Le Penism was a collective project, Macron bears more responsibility than most.

Ten years ago, Le Pen was known as the “devil of the republic”. Today, it is acceptable to honour his legacy while the celebrants of his death are cast as anti-republican.

Clearly then, Francois Bayrou’s statement was wrong. Le Pen’s “preferred weapon” was not controversy, but the Hilterjugend dagger inscribed with his name, that he left behind at the home of one of his torture victims. It might have been true once that his statements and provocations were a source of polemic. Today, however, his ideas are sickeningly mainstream. Fanatical anti-communism is integral to the Macron government and its war on the left, meanwhile ethnic nativism and Vichy apologia are creeping into the halls of power. Le Pen might be dead, but his politics is very much alive.