No “Joan to the Help” by Jean-Marie Le Pen or the RN this year under the statue of the heroine of the Hundred Years’ War, Place des Pyramides in Paris, but a Le Pen will pay tribute to her. After celebrating Joan of Arc every May 1st since 1988, the RN, at a meeting in Perpignan this Wednesday, will abstain this year.
A non-celebration which is in line with 2023 when Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella were content with a discreet laying of a wreath at the foot of the statue of the Maid of Orléans on the way back from Le Havre , after having held a banquet there. For the first time in more than thirty years, the figure of Joan of Arc was absent from the May 1 festivities of the far-right party. This will be the case again this year.
“There is no point for the RN to bring back to the forefront an image of the past,” analyzes Virginie Martin, doctor in political science and professor at Kedge Business School. “The RN no longer needs to make splashes like in the 1980s to exist. At the time, it allowed us to talk about him, but today it is no longer useful,” she continues.
Continue to kill the father
Now at the gates of power, and well ahead in voting intentions in the European elections on June 9, the party founded by Jean-Marie Le Pen is “beyond demonization. We are in an institutionalized party, which has 88 deputies and which must give a credible presidential image. So no more calls for help from a saint (Joan of Arc was canonized in 1920) and no more shaved heads, now relegated to the back of the meeting room, at the foot of a statue. “These images of the past, of a demonized past and of a time when the RN was electorally low. »
In fact, the challenge for the RN is to continue to turn the pages of the past and finish killing the father, who had “left a strong mark on this May 1 parade”. Thus, between the abandonment of the FN name in 2018 in favor of the RN and a new leadership, with Marine Le Pen then Jordan Bardella, the party continues “to stand out from the father, with a desire to tell a more social and less identity-based RN », adds the doctor of political science.
We understand that summoning Joan of Arc, and “a French-style purist and identity symbolism”, is no longer on the agenda of a party “which seeks to continue to gain votes without losing any”. A void into which Reconquest!, the party of Éric Zemmour, immediately rushed.
And there will indeed be a Le Pen this May 1st to celebrate Joan of Arc. Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, head of the Reconquest list! for the Europeans, has planned to go to Domrémy-la-Pucelle, in the Vosges, the native village of the heroine of the Hundred Years’ War.