Marine Le Pen's Political Patricide

Back in 1987, when Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the French radical-right party the National Front, dumped his wife of more than a quarter century, Pierrette Lalanne, she took revenge by stripping and posing in French Playboy. Now their daughter Marine Le Pen is dumping the old man, in turn, for making a crude spectacle of himself—banishing him from the party she inherited from him just four years ago. The occasion for the rupture is that the father, who got his start in politics as a fascist thug in Nazi-occupied Paris, and who has always and unapologetically carried a strong stench of anti-Semitism about him, gave an interview last week in which he dismissed the Holocaust as a triviality by describing the gas chambers in which Europe’s Jews were exterminated as “a detail” of history.