The suspension from the Front National of its co-creator and président d'honneur, Jean-Marie Le Pen, removes one rotten old apple. The barrel is still pretty full after this bizarre but highly entertaining family feud ...
Week after week, sometimes night after night, France makes up for that long post-war period of denial with long, powerful documentaries of every imaginable aspect of World War Two.
In exploring antisemitism, some of these programmes have gone deeper that the period before, during and immediately after that war.
On the night Jean-Marie Le Pen, newly suspended from the repugnant Front National, founded by him in 1972, was railing against his daughter, the party leader Marine – “I am ashamed that she carries my name … I repudiate her” – France 3 devoted two hours to the Dreyfus scandal.
Émile Zola's famous “J’accuse” article in the Paris newspaper L’Aurore blew apart the case that had been concocted against Capt Alfred Dreyfus, an artillery officer of Jewish background, that he had betrayed French military secrets to the Germans, though it still took eight years for his name to be cleared.
Today, I accuse all those French people who vote FN of bringing dishonour on their great country.
As someone said last night, in one of those protracted debates beloved of French TV, telling these electors they are supporting a racist, fascist or Nazi party has not made the slightest difference to voting intentions. They just go on, more and more of them, ticking the FN box.
My photo of Marine Le Pen in Toulon, 2011
Interviewed in the street, they talk happily of having giving the extrême-droite a chance, as if it were the most natural choice in the world. They see footage of FN thugs violently manhandling the admittedly irksome Femen demonstrators at a May Day rally, or attacking journalists and camera crews simply doing their job, and either nod their heads in approval or pay no attention.
Suspending a crustily irredeemable 86-year-old codger will not change a thing, except to annoy all those supporters of the party for whom he is and always will be its heart and soul. Plenty have taken his side even in the latest scandal.
So why has Le Pen, for decades the face of far-right intolerance and hatred of foreigners that has now swept Europe like a plague, been suspended for an as yet unspecified period, with the prospect of being stripped of his position as honorary president?
At a very time when his daughter Marine hopes to press on with her push for the presidency of France, he yet again undermines her policy of dédiabolisation - de-demonising the FN's gruesome image - by repeating the sort of views that have got him into trouble with French courts, and despised by decent people, in the past.
The gas chambers of the Nazi death camps, he cheerfully told the far-right magazine Rivarol, were a mere "detail" of WW2; it had been true when he first said it, he insisted, and it remained true now.
He also spoke warmly of the collaborationist leader of Vichy France, Marshal Philippe Pétain, convicted after the war of treason. Here was a man treated harshly after the liberation of France, he insisted. In the past, Le Pen, who has also characterised the German occupation of France as not particularly severe, has been fined and given suspended prison sentences for minimising Nazi crimes, including the massacre of Ascq.
Nor let us forget that he also said, just a few years ago: "I bought a house in the country so my children who live in the 15th arrondissement [a district of Paris] can see cows instead of Arabs." To be foreign, except maybe to be a foreigner invading from a particular neighbouring country, is to be beyond the pale, and you can be born in France and still foreign.
Don't take my word for it. Explore his site and his life and times and make up your own minds ....
Now I do not allege that these thoughts of his are shared by every one of the voters who have helped FN mayors into office around France and sent members to the French and European parliaments.
Jean-Marie Le Pen's granddaughter, Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, 25, has been MP for Carpentras since she was 22. Le Pen père et fils are both MEPs. Marion and her aunt deny being racist or antisemitic - Marine has even described the Holocaust as the "epitome of barbarity" - but, then, we have also heard such denials from him. Marine, unlike so many of her voters, even says the FN is neither of the extreme right nor anti-Islam. The whole clan resent what thy call the Islamisation of France.
But how can anyone who believes in republican, democratic ideals bring themselves to support the party as a whole if its creator thinks the way the evidence of his own words suggests?
Is it a little like collaboration, culpability arising on a widely differing scale from those who simply did what they had to to get through the war (= voting FN because however rotten they are, the mainstream parties seem ineffectual or more rotten still) to others who signed up wholesale to the Nazi ethos (= voting FN because they share Jean-Marie's outlook)?
For all I know, the family split may be everything it seems to be at face value. Marine Le Pen, having once been happy to embrace the FN and her father's heritage in their entirety, may genuinely now find his views repellent as well as politically embarrassing. She may squirm, inwardly at least, when she sees what neanderthal FN "security" men do at demonstrations or when awkward questions are asked; that in itself would be progress.
But perhaps she needs to do an awful lot to make us believe that when she attacks her father, it is not merely a "detail" of her drive for power, a flag of convenience the better to persuade the public of her innate own decency.
When Xavier Bertrand, a senior figure in the centre-right UKMP (now re-christened the republican party), was asked by Le Journal du Dimanche whether he thought the FN of Marine was different from the FN of her father, his reply was: "You know the popular expression. Dogs don't make cats."
I hold no vote in France, of course, and my opinion is just that of an outsider.
But try as I might, I just cannot think of the Front National as Marine Le Pen would like it to be seen (though her father emphatically would not): "A political party like any other."
And I shall continue to shiver with disgust when I see local government literature, pushed through my French letterbox, listing and quoting the minority FN presence in council chambers as if they had suddenly joined a truly republican party committed to the values of Liberté-Égalité-Fraternité.
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