LIAR. Crook. Cheat. All insults which Jean-Marie Le Pen likes to casually chuck at his political rivals. But the life of the Front Nationale leader is so well-stocked with sinister events that the usual roguery the French public have come to expect from their leaders looks like kindergarten misdemeanours in his looming shadow.
Take torture, for example. After a brief flirtation with the right- wing Poujadist Party in the 1950s, when he became the youngest-ever member of the French National Assembly, Le Pen joined a parachute regiment of the French Foreign Legion and headed for Algeria. France was then engaged in a bloody conflict with the Algerian independence movement, the FLN, which was trying to kick the French out of north Africa.
On April 1, a police investigation got underway into claims by a young Algerian called Abdenour Yahiaoui that he was tortured by Le Pen. In one report, filed by a police commissionaire, it was said "during his arrest two electric wires were connected to his earlobes and Lieutenant Le Pen himself operated a hand-driven transformer.
"In the presence of the same officer the young Yahiaoui was struck with a blackjack; he was bound naked on a bench, feet and hands tied, where he was forced to ingest some water. Finally, he was imprisoned for five days in a 'tomb', a hole dug in the earth with no amenities and closed in by barbed wire." In an interview with the newspaper Combat in 1962, Le Pen said: "I have nothing to hide. I tortured because it was necessary to do it."
But torture is not the only accusation which has dogged him since the days of the Battle of Algiers. Murder is another. The relatives of a Moroccan shopkeeper, Ahmed Moulay, say Le Pen and his men brutalised the 43-year-old as they raided his home in the middle of the night searching for his brother-in-law , a suspected terrorist.
Moulay died after he was taken to his nearby shop and tortured with electric shocks and water. The soldiers dressed his corpse, dumped it in the street and riddled it with bullets. The official version of the story has Moulay being shot dead while trying to escape routine questioning. Moulay's son Mohammed, who was then 12, found a knife similar to those carried by the Hitler Youth at the scene. It bore the inscription: J M Le Pen, First Parachute Regiment, French Foreign Legion.
Algeria wasn't Le Pen's first stint in the forces. In his early 20s, he dropped out of a law degree and volunteered for service with the Legion's First Parachute Regiment as the French took on Ho Chi Min in Indochina. Le Pen's biographer, Jonathan Marcus, says: "Despite the hagiographic portrayals of Le Pen in uniform as a man of action, his military service was rather less glorious." In his book, The Resistible Rise of Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marcus says the French were pulling out of Indochina by the time Le Pen arrived. The future demagogue was then posted to Tunisia were he worked as a journalist for a military newspaper.
If Indochina was inauspicious, it was Algeria that was to be the biggest influence on Le Pen's life. If the first world war forged Hitler's character and politics, it was the death throes of the French empire in Algiers that made Le Pen the man he is today.
As de Gaulle began to disentangle his nation from the interminable drain of money, resources and blood that was the Algerian war, Le Pen began his first serious flirtation with the extreme right. On top of torture and allegations of murder, Le Pen was now to add possible treason to his list of sins. The Fourth Republic was at real risk of falling as mass demonstrations protesting against any pull out from north Africa gripped Paris and beyond, and the army high command said it would no longer take orders from the Elysee, the office of the French president. Around this time, Le Pen met with Otto Skorzeny, an ex-commando and leader of the notorious Odessa organisation for Nazis.
Furious at de Gaulle's negotiations with rebels in 1960, French Algerians set up barricades in the streets of Algiers, topped with fascist emblems. Le Pen sided with the rebels.
After the rebellion was crushed Le Pen was expelled from Algeria, and hooked up with a group of anti-government conspirators in Paris. He held a meeting with one of the key plotters, General Andre Zeller, but was reported to have pulled out of the coup plot when Zeller ruled out a suprise occupation of Elysee and taking over TV and radio stations. Le Pen was later reported to say that he felt the only way to reverse de Gaulle's policy was to take over power in Paris and "eliminate" the head of state.
Le Pen's claims to be a Resistance hero also ring a little hollow. He says that as a teenager he participated in one of the most significant Resistance encounters of the Nazi occupation - the battle of Saint-Marcel in June 1944, when a unit of over 2000 resistance fighters was discovered by the Wehrmacht. However, several local resistance leaders say later that nobody by the name of Le Pen ever took part. His ex-wife Pierrette put the boot even further into his wartime credentials saying the only thing he ever did during the occupation was hide a gun under his bed.
Le Pen found himself in the political wilderness for more than a decade after the failed putsch over Algeria by French generals. To make ends meet he set up a small recording company specialising in military music and historical speeches. He was later taken to court for comments glorifying Hitler and war crimes on the sleeve-notes on one record of Nazi songs.
In 1972, he founded the Front Nationale. Four years later he found himself both a millionaire and embroiled in the ugliest of financial scandals. He had "inherited" a fortune from Hubert Lambert, a 42- year-old heir to a cement baron, an alcoholic and tranquilliser addict who dreamed of becoming a government minister in an extreme right-wing government and had been in and out of psychiatric institutions.
Just months before he died, Lambert changed his will in favour of Le Pen. Lambert's wealth was put at around 24 million francs, including a mansion on the outskirts of Paris called Saint-Cloud, where Le Pen now lives with his second wife and two Dobermans. Lambert's cousin, Phillipe, immediately challenged the will claiming that the millionaire had not been of sound mind and had been manipulated by Le Pen. Phillipe and Le Pen later came to an agreement out of court and split the cash between them. Le Pen's old student friend, para comrade and political fellow-traveller, Dr Jean-Maurice Demarquet, was called in by Le Pen shortly before Lambert died to act as his private physician.
When challenged over the mental health of Lambert, Le Pen asked Demarquet to publicly say Lambert was of sound mind. Demarquet refused, but then did say publicly that he found Lambert's sudden death "bizarre". He said he'd seen Lambert shortly before his death, adding: "He felt very bad and above all wanted to hear no more about Le Pen." Demarquet then spoke darkly about how giving a man with a terminal liver condition a drink of alcohol was the "perfect crime". Just for good measure, Demarquet added that Le Pen was also crudely and paranoically anti-semitic.
Another scandal came out in 1983 when it was claimed that Le Pen hadn't paid the French wealth tax in three years and owed some two million francs. Yet none of these scandals affect Le Pen, who appears to have convinced himself that he is whiter than white. "Chirac," he still says, "says all the political parties have dabbled in corruption. Well, not mine!"
Le Pen's taste in friends and colleagues is equally dubious. There's Bruno Gollnisch, a university professor and Front MEP, who was described by the French newspaper Le Monde as "a representative of the traditional extreme right which displays a certain understanding or sympathy for the revisionist view of the Nazi holocaust".
There's also Pierre Sergent, a former resistance fighter and military head of the terrorist movement OAS which plotted to kill de Gaulle. And then there's Roland Gaucher, a former Nazi collaborator in Vichy France; Pierre Bousquet, a convicted war criminal; Franois Brigneau, another member of the Vichy militia and the Waffen SS member Jean Castrillo. In September 1989, his close associate, the MEP Claude Autant-Lara, questioned the existence of the holocaust and, referring to Simone Veil, one of France's most popular politicians and a death camp survivor, said: "When people talk to me about genocide, I say they missed Mother Veil."
Le Pen's most infamous gaffe came in 1987 when he told a reporter that the gas chambers were a "detail of history". In 1990 this got him convicted of incitement to racial hatred and fined.
