A defiant Marine le Pen rallies in Paris

The right rarely take to the streets in France, but thousands gathered in Paris Sunday to hear Marine Le Pen pledge to continue the fight. The leader of the Rassemblement National was convicted of embezzlement last week, and among her punishments was a five-year political disqualification. She told her supporters she was a victim of a “witch-hunt” and they roared their agreement.

Le Pen had assembled her members in parliament and supporters in the Place Vauban, in the shadow of the Hôtel des Invalides, built by Louis XIV as a retirement home for old soldiers. In the days leading up to the rally, some of Le Pen’s political adversaries had warned she was leading the country towards insurrection. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the far-left firebrand, talked of “sedition.” Meanwhile, the centrist Xavier Bertrand said he feared the protest would result “in a bad remake of the Capitol” – a reference to the events of January 2021 in Washington when some Trump supporters stormed Congress.

Le Pen still dreams of winning the 2027 presidential election

As a veteran of protest rallies in France, mostly organized by the left, this was the first one where I was frisked by security agents. Even our bottles of water were removed to the consternation of some on a warm spring afternoon.

The security agents belonged to the Rassemblement National, as one told me, they were there to guard against an attack “from the extreme left.” As it turned out, there was only one small kerfuffle when three members of a feminist group bared their breasts for some reason or other. The left held their own rally on Sunday at the Place de la Republique on the other side of Paris, the object of which was to denounce the “fachos” [fascists’] who had gathered on the Place Vauban.

The men and women milling around me didn’t look like fascists. They were a broad cross-section of society: Parisians and provincials, working-class and bourgeois, men and women, young and old. Like the left-wing rallies I’ve attended over the years, the crowd in the Place Vauban was overwhelmingly white.

No one seemed in a seditious mood as they waited for Rassemblement’s 125 members take their seats on stage. The first to speak was Louis Aliot, the party’s vice president and one of those convicted alongside Le Pen. He pointed a finger at the European Union, claiming they were “complicit” in the witch-hunt.

Aliot accused Brussels of being desperate to “keep the system in place,” a strategy he dated to 2005 when France voted against the referendum on adopting the EU’s constitution. The referendum result was subsequently ignored by the Paris and Brussels elite, as was the case when the Dutch and Irish electorates also rejected the constitution.

Last week’s judgment on Le Pen and her co-accused ran to 174 pages and Aliot drew the crowd’s attention to one sentence in particular. “The attack on the interests of the European Union is particularly serious,” concluded the judge, “in that it is carried out… by a political party that claims to be opposed to the European institutions.”

This was proof, said Aliot, that the greatest crime of the Rassemblement National was their Euroskepticism. There was a distinct European flavor to the afternoon, despite the sea of France flags being waved by the crowd. In between speeches, a giant screen broadcast messages of support from other European politicians hostile to Brussels, among them Matteo Salvini, Italy’s Deputy Prime Minister, Holland’s Geert Wilders, Herbert Kickl of Austria’s Freedom party and Viktor Orbán.

Kickl won his country’s general election last fall, but his party was recently excluded from the three-party coalition assembled by Austrian centrists. This was very much the theme of Le Pen’s rally: that the European elite is determined to push back the populist tide using any means possible.

Le Pen herself vowed that they won’t succeed. She spoke for 40 minutes and promised that her party will never resort to “brutalization.” Instead, she said, they will campaign peacefully, like Martin Luther King, who fought “for the civil rights of American citizens who were oppressed and disenfranchised at the time.” She invited all “freedom-loving French people to join us in a peaceful, democratic, popular and patriotic resistance.”

Le Pen still dreams of winning the 2027 presidential election, and a poll published on Sunday confirmed that the events of the last week have done her no harm. She remains the people’s choice.

Some of the mainstream media mocked the fact that fewer than 10,000 people gathered in the Place Vauban. Is that all the Rassemblement National could muster? But Le Pen didn’t expect a big crowd. Paris is not her territory – but it is media-land. There were dozens of journalists present, and they did what she wanted: they relayed to the silent majority that she is far from finished.