Pierrette – 1st Generation
Pierrette Lalanne, the ex-wife of the far-right National Front (FN) founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, had posed nude for “Playboy” in a number of suggestive poses. No doubt her ex-husband had enjoyed the naked vacuum cleaning, after expressing views such as “women are only good for sweeping, mopping, washing and fulfilling their marital duties.” It was these views – the very views that drew him to the mother of Marine le Pen – that also led to the split as Pierrette found him to be far too conservative.
Still, the couple lived together from their marriage in 1960 to 1987 and had three daughters. The Playboy shoot was done in 1987 as revenge on her ex-husband where she performed the role of good little housewife who espoused the “traditional French values” her husband sought. Hence she went from “Le Pen” to “lapin” (bunny).
Marine Le Pen – 2nd Generation
Marine Le Pen inherited her mother’s genes and her father’s nationalist streak. A lawyer by nature she joined the FN in 1986, just a year before her mother became a Playboy Bunny. While this may have influenced her, there were other personal influences in her life:
• Still in her mother’s womb, more than a million protestors marched in Paris revolting against Charles De Gaulle’s paternalistic nation-state. Pierrette and Jean-Marie were staunch defenders of Gaullist politics.
Marine is the one in her mother’s arms
• At the age of 8 years, a bomb intended for her father ripped through her Paris home.
• As a young attorney, she took on immigration cases.
• As the new FN leader she decided to focus less on ethnicity and more on economics – something that annoyed her hotheaded father that she hasn’t spoken with since ousting from the party he created.
Marion Marechal-Le Pen – 3rd Generation
She was born on December 10, 1989, when her grandfather Jean-Marie le Pen was the honorary chairman of the FN. Her mother is Le Pen’s second daughter and does not carry any official role in the party, whereas in Christine Clerc’s book entitled “The Conquerors” in 2013, she revealed that Samuel Marechal was not her biological father. It was found later that her dad was Roger Auque, an investigative journalist who died in 2014. Marion sued L’Express for disclosing information that was a “serious invasion of her privacy.”
She became interested in politics when a teen, and attended a meeting headed by Nicolas Sarkozy out of curiosity though it was the FN that won her in the end. In 2012, she became the youngest citizen to enter French Parliament at the age of 22 and the youngest MP at the age of 24 years.
