The Machiavellis of Paris. What the story of "le Florentin" teaches us

Who is behind Roberto Vannacci? Who created the character, who pushed him to enter the fray, and who is backing the former general’s ‘dirty dozen’? Putin, Trump, the Black International, or the new Lord of Darkness, Peter Thiel? The journalist who manages to uncover this deserves a Pulitzer. There has also been speculation that this is a devious manoeuvre by the left to sink Salvini, frighten Meloni and bring down the coalition. Perhaps, but it would require a subtle and perverse mind that is hard to spot on the horizon today. It would take someone like François Mitterrand, the Socialist French president, who favoured Jean-Marie Le Pen to weaken the Gaullists. But beware: he enjoyed only a momentary and fleeting success, and since then Le Penism has taken root in France and undermined its political system. Here is the story of what happened forty years ago and of what might happen within a year’s time, at the now imminent presidential elections.

The Florentines called him that to compare him to Machiavelli, and he, a cultured intellectual, felt proud of it, not indignant. A true master of political (and romantic) waltzes, Mitterrand spared no effort in his life. Born in the terrible year of 1916, when the French army was on the verge of collapsing under the fire of Krupp cannons, the son of a stationmaster and a voracious reader, he leaned to the right in his youth; as a soldier and later an infantry sergeant, he witnessed the collapse of the Maginot Line and, in 1940, was taken prisoner by the Germans; he escaped a year later and made his way to the collaborationist Vichy regime, where he went so far as to write: “If France does not wish to perish in this mire, the last Frenchmen worthy of the name must declare all-out war on everyone—both within and without—who is preparing to open the floodgates: Jews, Freemasons, Communists… always the same lot, and all Gaullists”. He later changed his mind, but continued to detest General de Gaulle, even though, once he became President of the Republic, he did not shy away from following in his footsteps – as when he prevented Ronald Reagan’s aircraft, which were due to bomb Tripoli and kill Gaddafi, from flying over France (not only that, he informed Bettino Craxi, who in turn warned the Colonel, thereby saving his life). Returning to the young “Florentine,” in the summer of ’43 Mitterrand went underground under the name Morland. Once Paris was liberated, he was sidelined. In 1946, he was elected to the National Assembly for the first time on the lists of the UDSR, the Democratic and Socialist Union of the Resistance, the moderate wing of the left. He became a follower of Pierre Mendès France, a Sephardic Jew of Portuguese origin (his family name was Mendes de França), an economist, Freemason and member of the Resistance in the entourage of Charles de Gaulle; in 1944, he represented France at Bretton Woods, where the post-war monetary system was decided. When Mendès France formed a centre-left government in 1954, he appointed Mitterrand as Minister of the Interior. The cabinet fell a year later as the war in Algeria intensified.

At this point, the towering General makes a grand return; to put an end to the instability of the Fourth Republic, he proposes a constitutional amendment. Mendès France opposes this, whilst Mitterrand denounces the ‘white coup’. The referendum seals the Gaullist victory and the Fifth Republic is born. Thus begins a long period in the wilderness; the defeat of May ’68 marks the political isolation of both the radical and moderate left. Mitterrand had founded his own small party and, in 1971, became an advocate for socialist unification at the Epinay Congress. A year later, a joint programme with the Communist Party was agreed. The following decade was spent amid internal squabbles and political zigzags until, in 1977, the Socialists overtook the Communists for the first time in the general election; this laid the groundwork for the turning point of 1981, which led to the victory of the Left and the conquest of the Élysée Palace against Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. The government got off to a flying start: the abolition of the death penalty, the 36-hour working week, the nationalisation of major industries and banks (including the Rothschilds’), a tax on large fortunes, and the legalisation of immigrants. Three years later, ‘Le Florentin’ was forced to change course; public finances were in tatters and the economy had ground to a halt. Austerity measures were introduced and support for the government plummeted.

We need this brief summary to set the scene for 1986, a year in which all the polls predicted a collapse of the Left in favour of the neo-Gaullists led by Jacques Chirac. It was at this point that Mitterrand staged his little ‘white coup’: he suddenly decided to change the electoral system from a first-past-the-post system to a proportional representation system, with the aim of mitigating the Socialist debacle, but above all of creating an enemy to the right of the Rassemblement pour la République led by Chirac. This brings us to Le Pen. He was neither a puppet nor a creation of the shrewd president, it should be noted. A Breton, the son of a fisherman, born in 1928, after graduating with a law degree Jean-Marie enlisted in the Foreign Legion, fighting in Indochina and Algeria, where he was accused of torture. In 1956 he set off for Suez: France, alongside Britain and Israel, sought to wrest control of the canal – which had been nationalised by Gamal Abdel Nasser, the officer who had overthrown Faruq’s fragile monarchy in a coup in 1952 – from Egypt. Had they succeeded, the history of the Middle East would have been different. The logic of Yalta and the Russian-American division of influence prevailed. Le Pen also arrived, but a truce had already been reached. He remained closely tied to the Foreign Legion, even after entering politics in the wake of Pierre Poujade, one of the fathers of populism not only in France but across Europe – more so than Guglielmo Giannini’s ‘Man of the People’, who had been preaching anti-politics a full ten years earlier. In 1958, Le Pen broke with Poujade and was re-elected to parliament with the National Centre of Independents and Peasants. His movement took on a hue of ‘military glory’, xenophobia, and nostalgia for the strongman and for fascism. He looked closely to the Italian Social Movement and to Giorgio Almirante, whom he would always regard as a mentor, so much so that he condemned Gianfranco Fini as a traitor. In 1972, he founded the Front National and adopted the tricolour flame from the MSI’s emblem, symbolising the return of the Duce’s spirit.

When I interviewed him at his ‘castle’ in Saint-Cloud – his home and headquarters on the outskirts of Paris – that thunderous and vitriolic accusation against the Fiuggi turnaround made the front page of the Corriere della Sera. During the interview he remained seated sideways, showing me only one side of his face—the side with his one good eye. He had lost the other. According to legend, it happened in battle; others claimed it was during a hunting expedition; he himself spoke of a brawl; according to Le Parisien, however, it was due to a poorly treated illness. A pirate-style black eye patch that had helped him forge his persona. The report in the Parisian daily was accompanied by several photographs of the far-right leader: in one, his right eye is covered; in another, taken years later, it is his left. In the end, Jean-Marie offered his own version of events: in 1958, during a scuffle, his right eye popped out of its socket, but was put back in place. Years later, a traumatic cataract clouded his left eye. But that inevitably sidelong gaze has become part of the Le Pen legend.

The FN’s early days were truly modest: in the 1974 presidential election, it secured a mere 0.75 per cent of the vote. The era of major modernisation launched by the former banker Georges Pompidou and implemented by Valéry Giscard d’Estaing was beginning, and the French wanted nothing to do with para-fascist populism. But the mole began to burrow, and the failure of the Union de la Gauche shifted the mood of the electorate. And so we come to the 1986 general election and the manoeuvres of ‘Il Florentin’.

The President is well aware of the mood of the electorate, the divisions within the left-wing camp, and the unease felt by the Socialists as they are forced to come to terms with the shift towards moderation. And he sees not only the Gaullists but also the Giscardian centrists gaining ground. It is crystal clear to him that he will have to swallow a ‘cohabitation’ – that is, appoint a centre-right government – whilst his hated Chirac rubs his hands with glee at Paris City Hall (he had become mayor in 1977). So Mitterrand takes the plunge and changes the electoral system: voting will no longer be by first-past-the-post, but by proportional representation. The right now has an enemy to its right and, as they say in France too, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. The calculation only partly pays off: the Front National comes close to 10 per cent, but it certainly weakens Chirac’s supporters. The Socialist Party managed to hold its own with a solid 31 per cent, yet the left did not secure a majority and ‘cohabitation’ became inevitable, with just two years to go before the presidential elections. Mitterrand was aware that, within the Socialist ranks, the candidate riding high was Michel Rocard. He would attempt to undermine Rocard by changing the electoral law once again and standing for election in 1988, when he defeated Chirac with 54 per cent of the vote. The Front National exceeds 14 per cent; perhaps this is not quite as good as Mitterrand had expected, but in the meantime it has been legitimised. Le Pen is no longer a pariah or an outsider, and as the years go by, he will no longer even be an underdog. In 2002, he reached the run-off against the evergreen Chirac, for whom even the Socialists voted in what they called ‘the republican surge’. In the 2007 presidential elections, the contest returned to a showdown between the Gaullists and the Socialists – the two parties which, in many respects, had been the political pillars of the Fifth Republic but were no longer so. Sarkozy won and, whether he liked it or not, Jean-Marie prepared to hand over the reins to his daughter Marine. It did not go smoothly at all; on the contrary, a saga with Shakespearean overtones began.

To signal a sharp break with the past, Marine – president of the FN since 2011 – refuses to take part in the large marches organised by the Manif pour Tous association against same-sex marriage. This is a severe blow to long-standing Front National supporters, who are beginning to denounce the existence of a ‘gay lobby’ at the top of the party in the weekly magazine Minute. This represents an even more severe blow for her father, who is no longer in charge. Leading the faction is another Le Pen, Marion, a very young MP newly elected at the age of just 23, blonde and no less ambitious than her aunt (a Member of the European Parliament, she is now married to Vincenzo Sofo of Fratelli d’Italia). Her mother, Yan, is Marine’s sister and had her with Samuel Maréchal, founder of the Front’s youth movement. Or rather, he recognised her as his daughter when the little girl was already two years old. According to an investigation by the weekly L’Express, the biological father is said to be the journalist and diplomat Roger Auque, who confirmed this in his memoirs. Jean-Marie, Marine, Marion, Le Pen and Maréchal: the family saga is intertwined with political events. To punish the rebel, her aunt purged the party of dissidents, entrusting the task to her then partner, Louis Aliot – nicknamed ‘Loulou la purge’ for his determination in carrying out political purges. This proved to be the final straw: the grandfather sided with his granddaughter, while the others backed Marine, who was attempting to step out from under the overbearing shadow of a parent who, out of spite, publicly unleashed his most extreme beliefs—starting with anti-Semitism—reiterating that the gas chambers were ‘a detail of history’.

The FN is in disarray. The fateful date is 4 May 2015: the father disowns his daughter, declares he is ashamed that she bears his name and hopes she will lose it as soon as possible. Marine feels ready for the great challenge of 2017 against Macron, the young and ambitious thoroughbred who had cut his teeth with the Rothschilds, just as Pompidou had done, to whom de Gaulle had bequeathed his political legacy. With Jean-Marie’s departure, many financial backers also leave, and the party is left high and dry. At this point, the trap springs, and Marine falls into it like a novice. It is none other than Vladimir Putin who opens the doors for her: a bank believed to be close to the Kremlin, the First Czech Russian Bank, lends nine million euros to the National Front. It is no gift – interest is paid – but that money reeks of sulphur and will go up in flames. Macron triumphs.

Marine is in crisis, even though she refuses to fade into the background. Scandals, legal battles, political intrigues, treacherous relatives – all this seems to have brought her to her knees, whilst Bel Bardella, the new, respectable face, is gaining ground; it seems he must be the right candidate, a sort of Macron born of the far right, backed by that section of the establishment which considers Gaullism a lost cause, just as it does socialism on the other side. But a Le Pen is always a Le Pen, and Marine isn’t giving up: the Élysée Palace remains the pinnacle of her ambitions; she is even regaining Marion’s support and preparing for battle as if for a triumphal march. France’s republican spirit has become clouded, and there is a risk that it will be lost entirely in a country torn as never before by crises and conflicts that are not merely political, but economic, social and ideological.

When Jean-Marie died on 7 January 2025, aged 96, his daughter had just returned from a trip to Mayotte, a French archipelago in the Indian Ocean, and paid tribute to him only the day after his death with a message in true Breton style: “Fair winds and following seas, Dad”. The Rassemblement National, as the party is now known, issued a statement: “Over more than six decades of active political struggle, Jean-Marie Le Pen proved himself to be a visionary, bringing to the forefront of public debate the major issues that shape today’s political life, such as demographics and its corollary, immigration, globalisation and France’s decline, national sovereignty and the risk of dilution within the European Union.” An agenda that is perhaps too moderate for Vannacci, but the Brothers of Italy could not have put it better themselves.