Leadership Quote by Jean-Marie Le Pen

Le Pen flips the moral script with a single, loaded substitution: the “real torture” isn’t what states do in interrogation rooms, it’s what terrorists inflict on society. The move is rhetorically neat because it doesn’t deny torture as a concept; it relocates it. By expanding “torture” from a legal and physical practice into a collective emotional condition, he dodges the procedural questions (law, oversight, limits) and lands on a visceral ledger of pain. That’s the intent: make the audience feel that outrage is the only honest response, and that anything short of maximal retaliation is a kind of complicity.

The subtext is harsher. If terror is “the real torture,” then state violence becomes secondary, even petty, in the moral hierarchy. The phrase quietly invites a permissive stance toward abuses: if the nation is already being “tortured,” extraordinary countermeasures start to look like self-defense rather than transgression. It’s a classic securitarian pivot, trading the language of rights for the language of wounds.

Context matters because Le Pen’s career sits in the French far-right tradition that treats national identity as fragile and permanently under siege. In post-attack France, where public fear and grief are politically available, this framing functions as a wedge against human-rights critics: their concern can be painted as tenderness toward perpetrators and coldness toward victims. The line works not by arguing, but by reassigning sympathy and redefining what counts as violence worth condemning.