Police in France are investigating after Jean-Marie Le Pen’s tomb was vandalised, less than three weeks after the founder of France’s far-right National Front party was buried.
One of his daughters, Marie Caroline Le Pen, posted a picture of the damage on X, saying there are “no words to describe individuals who attack what is most sacred”.
“Those who attack the dead are capable of the worst against the living,” she wrote.
Rubble and damaged flowers were strewn on top of and around the tomb.
The stone bearing his name and dates was lying on the ground, while the stone cross on top of the grave had been smashed into pieces, according to French newspaper Le Monde.
Le Pen’s granddaughter, European Parliament member Marion Marechal, said on X: “Do you think you can break our hearts, intimidate us, discourage us? Our response will be to fight you ever harder, generation after generation. Our determination will match your infamy.”
National Rally (formerly the National Front) leader Jordan Bardella said on X the vandalism was “unspeakable” and carried out by “those who respect neither the living nor the dead”.
French interior minister Bruno Retailleau denounced the damage as “an absolute abjection”, saying on X that respect for the dead “is what distinguishes civilisation from barbarism”.
Authorities in Brittany, where he was interred in a family tomb in the small port of La Trinite-sur-Mer, said they heard about the damage on Friday.
In a statement they said that “given the political sensitivity”, there had been increased police surveillance before and after his burial, but it had since been scaled down.
Patrols of the site will now be stepped back up again “given the exceptional nature” of the attack, they said.
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Mr Le Pen, a frequent Holocaust denier, was convicted multiple times of antisemitism, discrimination and inciting racial violence, but his extreme views won him staunch supporters.
Famous for his fiery rhetoric against immigration and multiculturalism, he made Muslim immigrants his prime target, blaming them for France’s economic and social woes.
He shocked France’s political establishment by reaching the presidential election run-off vote against Jacques Chirac in 2002 and, despite losing in a landslide, he changed the country’s politics during his decades-long career.
After leading the then National Front from 1972 to 2011, he was succeeded as party chief by his daughter, Marine Le Pen.
She has since run for the presidency three times and turned the party, now called the National Rally, into one of the country’s main political forces.
She faces a potential prison term and ban on running for political office if convicted in an embezzlement trial. A final judgement in the case is expected later this year.
