Paris // Six months ago, France’s far-right leader Marine Le Pen stormed out of her father Jean-Marie’s house after his Doberman dog savaged her Bengal cat to death.
A foretaste perhaps of the recent dogfight that has torn apart the National Front party Jean-Marie founded but also the Le Pen family that has already had more than its fair share of scraps.
From the vengeful naked appearance of an ex-wife in Playboy to the treachery and “excommunication” of an eldest daughter, the patriarch Jean-Marie Le Pen, 86, has a family history almost as colourful as his controversial Holocaust comments.
It wasn’t always this way.
Once upon a time, they were the model of a united French family, the proud father Jean-Marie posing with his wife Pierrette and his three impossibly blonde daughters outside the family estate near Paris.
But cracks soon began to appear.
In 1987, Jean-Marie and Pierrette became embroiled in a messy divorce, which the French press pored over in minute detail.
As the public spat became increasingly bitter, she posed for a provocative photo spread in Playboy that left nothing to the imagination in a bid to humiliate him.
Then things turned sour with eldest daughter Marie-Caroline. She backed a rival candidate to her father in a National Front split and was promptly banished from the family.
“Our children sometimes and our grandchildren give us great joy ... but sometimes worries and pains,” Jean-Marie said pointedly in a recent interview.
He is thought to be especially close to his granddaughter Marion Marechal Le Pen, a rising star in the party whom he persuaded into politics.
But even she dismissed his recent sorties about Nazi gas chambers as a “useless provocation.”
The latest spat in the Le Pen family history threatens to split the National Front in two and is being played out in the full glare of the French media.
The 86-year-old, nicknamed the “Menhir” — an ancient rock — partly because of his Breton roots but also his immovability, reiterated his long-held view that the Nazi gas chambers were a “detail of history.”
“He’s really pissing me off,” was the reported response of Marine, now president of the party and in the middle of a drive to clean up its racist and anti-Semitic image.
Then she launched her own media blitz, saying he was committing “political suicide”, that he would be dragged before a disciplinary committee and that she would oppose his standing in forthcoming regional elections.
Cue open warfare via the media. Jean-Marie hit back, saying it was in fact his daughter that was “shooting herself in the foot” and that far from going quietly, he would “defend himself” and “probably go on the attack.”
“Marine Le Pen might want me dead. That’s possible. But she cannot count on my cooperation,” said Jean-Marie.
For her part, Marine said the fight saddens her as a daughter but her political responsibilities run deeper than her filial duty to the man she tends to refer to in public as simply “Le Pen.”
And although Marine’s strategy is clearly to offer a more presentable face to the public, her mother Pierrette describes her as “the absolute clone of her father.”
As for him, there is a clear sense of betrayal.
“It’s always those closest to you that betray you,” he said in a recent interview.
*Agence France-Presse