Politics & Power Quote by Jean-Marie Le Pen

A neat little act of historical laundering hides inside the passive voice. By framing Vichy France as simply “under occupation” and “carrying out the orders” of Germany, Jean-Marie Le Pen isn’t offering a neutral description so much as a legalistic alibi: responsibility is shifted upward, agency is blurred, and collaboration is reduced to administrative inevitability. The sentence is built to sound like common sense, which is precisely the danger. It makes moral choice look like paperwork.

The intent is political, not archival. Le Pen’s long project on the French far right depended on rehabilitating a certain idea of the nation: France as perpetually innocent, forever betrayed by outsiders, never truly complicit. This line plugs into that narrative by recoding Vichy as a coerced puppet rather than a regime that often anticipated German demands, competed in zeal, and used the moment to pursue its own authoritarian program. “Carried out the orders” implies a chain of command with no room for initiative; it quietly erases the fact that collaboration could be opportunistic, ideological, even eager.

The subtext is a nationalist comfort: if the occupier is the sole author of atrocity, then French institutions are merely contaminated, not culpable. It’s also a rhetorical hedge against the postwar consensus, solidified in later decades by historians and by state acknowledgments, that Vichy bore responsibility for deportations and persecution. Le Pen’s phrasing doesn’t deny the crimes outright; it reassigns ownership of them. That’s how revisionism often works: not with a shout, but with a grammatically plausible shrug.