The death this morning of Jean Marie Le Pen takes us back — to a lunch with the rightist at Paris. It was a  memorable meal. We were then writing editorials for the Wall Street Journal, headquartered at Brussels. We were being importuned by a faction of American conservatives to try to find common ground with the French rightist. At the suggestion of the Journal’s editor, Robert Bartley, we invited Le Pen to lunch.

The repast took place in the mid-1980s at a Michelin-starred restaurant on, naturally, the Right Bank. We brought along a friend, James Rosenstein*, a leading interpreter of French and English. We worried that the elegant restaurant, with its immigrant staff, might be uncomfortable hosting such a controversial politician. So we set the lunch for noon, before the restaurant filled up, and reserved a private room, out of sight and in the back. 

Naive us. Just before noon, the entire restaurant staff, down to the dish washers, formed up in the dining room a receiving line. Le Pen’s limousine hauled up in front. Le Pen emerged wearing an immaculate suit and tie and full of cheer. The owner of the restaurant and we met him at the door. Each member of the restaurant staff bowed in a welcoming gesture as Le Pen swept past. Let us just say, one could have knocked us over with a feather.

At lunch, Le Pen listened politely, as we later wrote, to an explication of the Journal’s view on immigration. It reckons, in short, that unemployment stems not from too many immigrants but from too much socialism. Immigrants are a healthy sign. Mr. Le Pen insisted that he was not against the immigrants because they were Arabs. He was, we wrote, “in favor of France — the nation, its culture, and its language.” Call it France First.

“To drive home this point,” we later wrote, Le Pen “recalled that during the Algerian war he argued that Algeria and the people who lived there should be made a part of France. That would have given them French citizenship and allowed them to live and work in France. Few other politicians, Mr. Le Pen asserted, were prepared to take so radical a position. It was, he pointed out, de Gaulle who let  Algeria go independent, separating itself from France.

Le Pen disapproved of North African Arab immigrants rejecting assimilation in France. Mosques were proliferating. In some neighborhoods as much Arabic was spoken as French. It is not racist, Mr. Le Pen avered, to want to preserve a national culture and identity. This should be no less true for France, say, than Israel, he said. Mr. Le Pen, we wrote, put the point inoffensively. Yet later he would call the gas chambers of the Holocaust a “detail” of history.

“Racism was not the question over which our conversation found its dead end, though it would have eventually,” we wrote. “It was over the economic question.” Le Pen might have been an anti-communist, but he was not pursuing the ideal of economic liberty. He evinced little feel for the proposition that free movement must be allowed not only for goods and capital but also for labor. So the Journal hung back from support for Le Pen.

As history unfolded, it would be Le Pen’s daughter, Marine, who broke with the dark side of her father’s worldview. Even so, she still faces high hurdles in her quest for the presidency. She has yet to sign on to and make exciting the ideas of economic liberty that, say, have incited Javier Milei’s revolution in Argentina. And that are today, in the wake of President-elect Trump’s triumph at the polls, restoring a sense of optimism, growth, and freedom in America.

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* Our magnificent friend, we are sad to report, died Friday at the age of 78.