Marine Le Pen’s recent detoxification of the Front National has been at the expense of the party’s intellectual traditions.

The French far right party, the Front National, has been a perennial part of French elections for nearly 40 years, first under Jean-Marie Le Pen, and more recently his daughter, Marine. As part of our continuing series on the French elections, John Gaffney charts the intellectual history of the party and argues that Marine Le Pen has shed much of this legacy in order to rehabilitate the party to have a greater populist appeal.