Profile : Le Pen: Dark Side of the French Soul : Crude, powerful and dangerous, the onetime barroom brawler with the mesmerizing oratory has built a career on hatred. His party is France’s third-strongest force.

Standing shoulder to shoulder under the flame-shaped symbols of the National Front, mesmerized by the anti-immigrant polemics of their square-jawed hero, the crowds that follow French right-wing political leader Jean-Marie Le Pen are an odd assortment of society’s rebels and rejects.

Tattooed skinheads wearing T-shirts proclaiming “Hitler Was Right” stand next to prim, provincial schoolmarms. Fastidious monarchists from Paris’ finer neighborhoods share space in the ranks with disaffected Communist factory workers from the dreary industrial suburbs. Rebel Roman Catholic priests, defenders of the traditional Latin Mass, rub elbows with neo-Nazis.

“France for the French,” Le Pen tells them. (Enthusiastic cheers.)

“Three million unemployed and three million immigrants are too many,” he asserts. (Lots of knowing head-nodding.)

The rally might be at any of a hundred favorite National Front haunts--at the party’s annual parade for Jeanne d’Arc in the heart of Paris; in a stadium in one of the tense immigrant-worker neighborhoods in Marseilles; at a converted hangar at the old Le Bourget airport, where Lindbergh landed. But the words and blustery style remain the same. “The barbarians are at our doors,” Le Pen warns. (A near-hysterical response.)

Born into a family of fishermen on the Britanny coast, educated in law in Paris, where he was also a rugby player and a barroom brawler, the 61-year-old Le Pen is a powerful, demagogic speaker evocative of American politician George Wallace in his prime.

“He is by far the best political speaker in France today,” said Dominique Moisi, associate director with the French Institute of International Relations in Paris, “and that is why he is so dangerous. He is crude, vulgar--probably a fascist--but he is a very able politician.”

After battling for years on the fringes of the French political scene, Le Pen and the extreme right-wing National Front political party he formed in 1972 have surpassed the Communists as the third most important political force in France, behind the Socialists and the parties of the mainstream right. Some recent polls show the National Front with support from as much as 17% of the French electorate.

A recent secret report by the French domestic intelligence agency, Renseignement Generaux, discreetly leaked to several journalists, was even bolder in its estimates of Le Pen’s strength. The report estimated that if elections were held tomorrow, the National Front could gain as much as 20% of the French vote. “That means that no majority on the right could be formed without Le Pen,” said one alarmed political analyst.

As it is now, the National Front holds only one seat in the 577-member National Assembly. The next parliamentary elections are not slated for France until 1993. The next presidential election is not until 1995. Opponents of Le Pen are hoping that the resurgent enthusiasm for the extreme right--born out of what they see as a general cynicism toward French politics and politicians--will die down before these votes.

In the meantime, however, Le Pen has emerged as the undisputed leader of the extreme right in all of Europe--the pivotal figure at the increasingly frequent meetings between similarly minded politicians from other European states.

By exploiting widespread fears in France about the swelling immigrant population, mostly North African Arabs, and flirting with traditional right-wing anti-Semitism that dates to the turn-of-the-century Dreyfus trial, Le Pen has built a solid, if disparate, following.

After the macabre desecration of a Jewish graveyard in the southern French city of Carpentras earlier this month, French Interior Minister Pierre Joxe accused Le Pen, whom he called a “racist and provocateur,” of creating a political climate that led to the attack.

“Like all racists,” said Joxe, “like all those who express their anti-Semitism in explicit or implicit fashion, he (Le Pen) is obviously one of those responsible. . . . “

In a television appearance on the eve of the Carpentras attack, Le Pen complained that there were too many Jews in the French media. “That’s the first time since the end of World War II that anyone has dared to make a statement like that,” said French lawyer and Nazi-hunter Serge Klarsfeld.

Such performances on national television have prompted efforts by some of Le Pen’s opponents, notably the Communist Party, to have him barred from the airwaves. In addition, French mayors have been increasingly reluctant to allow National Front meetings in their cities. One of the biggest setbacks for Le Pen came last week when the mayor of his hometown in Brittany denied permission for a meeting next month that would have included Le Pen and other European leaders of the extreme right.

But others, including former European Parliament President Simone Veil, a French survivor of the Auschwitz death camp, argue that such bannings and censorship will only make Le Pen stronger, since they fuel his carefully nurtured image as a loner and a martyr.

At the core of Le Pen’s popular appeal is the shared feeling among his supporters that French culture is being diluted by “foreigners.” In their minds, the lepenists see themselves as embattled defenders of the only true France--a stoutly Roman Catholic France they see threatened on all sides by people of different races, creeds and political ideas.

During an unsettling time in which more than 3 million immigrants have changed the ethnic base of France and when the prospect of united, borderless Europe is on the horizon, such a nationalistic appeal works well here. More than any other issue, polls conclude, the problems resulting from immigration are seen as the biggest national issue by the French populace.

“Le Pen,” admitted Socialist politician Laurent Fabius, a former prime minister who now serves as Speaker of the National Assembly, “has posed the right questions with the wrong answers.”

Anne Tristan, 30, is a French journalist who for six months in 1987 posed as an unemployed typist and clandestinely joined the National Front in Marseilles. The book that resulted from her experience, “On the Front,” provided one of the first outside glimpses into the cadres of Le Pen’s party. In its heart, she concluded, the Le Pen movement is a fascist ideology that includes strong strains of anti-Semitism.

“It is true that at Le Pen rallies,” she said during a recent interview, “the people come from all different segments of society. But what draws them all there is the shared idea of a strong power at the center. Outside of this motivating factor there are no ideas, really, only emotions. They are all people looking for a way to express their hate. They are looking for targets like Arabs and Jews.”

Jean-Marie Le Pen was born June 20, 1928, in the Breton fishing village of La Trinite-sur-Mer near Vannes in far northwestern France. Both his grandfather and father were fishermen off the Atlantic coast. In 1942, his father was killed after his small craft ran into a German mine about a mile offshore.

The death did not, apparently, turn the young Le Pen against Germans or even the German military. In 1971, the year before he created the National Front political party, he was convicted in a French court of possessing audiotapes of Nazi war songs, including the anthem of the Nazi Party. Possession of these materials was made illegal in postwar France under a statute entitled “Glorifying War Crimes.” Nevertheless, they are widely available in many right-wing bookstores, alongside other such dubious (and technically illegal) titles as “How to Recognize a Jew.”

As a member of the European Parliament, Le Pen has many acquaintances outside France. One of his best friends and political allies is former Waffen SS Sgt. Franz Schoenhuber, leader of the German right-wing Republican Party.

Too young to fight in World War II, Le Pen worked as a fisherman and a miner to help pay for his studies. As a law student in Paris, he was known for his fervent anti-communism and for his fondness for street fights and barroom brawls.

National Front member Jacques Peyrat vividly recalled the first time he met Le Pen during their student days in Paris. “One day I heard this clamor outside the Sorbonne,” Peyrat recalled during an interview with the French newspaper Le Monde. “I saw this guy fighting all alone, back against the wall, against the police and some Communists. He was taking it on the chin but fighting back and asking for more. I asked him who he was. He said ‘I’m Le Pen, president of the law students.’ I’ve been with him ever since.”

In 1954, Le Pen enlisted in the army to go to Vietnam as an officer in the elite foreign parachute battalion. Unfortunately for the gung-ho anti-Communist, he arrived a few days after the crushing defeat of French forces at Dien Bien Phu.

Returning to Paris, Le Pen joined the short-lived Poujadist Movement--a populist movement formed around France’s shopkeepers organized by Pierre Poujade. Running as a Poujadist from the Brittany city of Rennes, Le Pen, only 27 years old at the time, was elected as the youngest member of the National Assembly.

In Paris, he reasserted himself as a fierce anti-Communist. During a political rally at the time, Le Pen lost one of his eyes in a fight. Although he later obtained a glass eye, which made him more presentable for public appearances, for years the rakish black eyepatch over his left eye made him an immediately identifiable figure in French politics.

The late British journalist Sam White remembered his first encounter with Le Pen. After having drinks together in a Left Bank apartment, Le Pen offered to give White a ride home in a taxi. Somewhere on the Boulevard Saint Michel, in the heart of the Latin Quarter, Le Pen pulled out a gun and pointed it out the window.

When White demanded the reason, Le Pen explained that his life was in danger; the Communists were out to get him, he said, and the gun was his protection. White excused himself and got out at the next traffic signal.

There may have been some justification for the sense of danger. Years later, Le Pen’s apartment in Paris was blown up in a bomb attack.

In 1958, Le Pen again joined a parachute unit to serve in Algeria. His opposition to the French pullout from Algeria marked him as an extremist opponent to French President Charles de Gaulle, whom he never forgave for abandoning the French colonists in Algeria. In 1960, he was targeted in a French police roundup of extremist leaders. Holed up in his Paris apartment, Le Pen allegedly shouted at police standing outside: “If anyone opens that door, I will open fire!” The incident ended peacefully; he was taken into custody and later released without charges.

After his defeat in the 1962 parliamentary elections, Le Pen went into a period of political eclipse, although he continued to maintain his close contacts with the notorious OAS, the secret army of former French military officers who served in Algeria.

He formed his National Front in 1972. In 1974, he ran for president of the French republic but won less than 1% of the vote.

During this period, he struggled to make a living as a small publisher while he and his blonde wife, Pierrette, raised their three daughters. (The marriage ended in divorce in 1985. The breakup has caused Le Pen no end of political embarrassment, particularly when his ex-wife posed nude for the European edition of Playboy magazine before the 1988 elections.)

Among other things, the former wife claimed in interviews that Le Pen had accepted a bribe of $500,000 to place a Romanian secret agent on his list of National Front candidates for the European Parliament.

Le Pen’s biggest political windfall came in 1977 when French cement magnate Hubert Lambert died and left the right-wing politician the bulk of his estate, including a large villa named Montretout (which in French means “show all”) on a hill in the expensive suburb of Saint Cloud. The gift made Le Pen instantly wealthy and gave him a political base to run his campaigns.

By time of the presidential elections in 1988, Le Pen had built his national base to over 10%, winning 14% in the first round of the presidential vote. More recent European Parliament elections gave his party a broader international base, as it again won 14% of the French vote and placed several National Front members in the Parliament.

At times such as the announcement of his platform for the European elections, Le Pen greets visiting reporters at the gate of the mansion, guarded by two Doberman pinschers. If the weather is good, he guides them to the splendid garden with several huge chestnut trees shading a sweep of lawn.

If the visitor is American, Le Pen likes to talk about his affection for former President Ronald Reagan and market-based economics. There is too much government interference into the private lives and pockets of the French people, he contends. He produces graphs and charts demonstrating how much higher the French tax load on businesses is than in the United States.

But one of his favorite subjects is the AIDS virus, which he sees as a metaphor for fallen morality--homosexuality and drug abuse--the world over. “Europe,” he tells a visitor, “is in grave danger of losing its vitality because of its dropping birthrate, crime, drugs and AIDS.”

A year ago, Le Pen got into trouble for what he called a “slip of the tongue” in which he made a pun combining the name of a Jewish French minister in the Socialist government and the word for the crematoria-ovens used to burn the bodies of Jews in Nazi death camps.

Lately, he has come up with another play on words that he uses to describe his program for dealing with AIDS--which is known in France by the acronym SIDA. Rather than go through the lengthy and costly process of treating SIDA patients, he has announced to the delight of his followers, why not just ship them to “Sidatoriums” where they can all be disposed of quickly and efficiently?

For Jean-Marie Le Pen, a man of simple, direct action, this would be the final solution to the AIDS problem.

Biography

Name: Jean-Marie Le Pen

Title: Leader of France’s National Front, an extreme right-wing political party that he formed in 1972.

Age: 61

Nationality: French; born into a family of fishermen on the Brittany coast; educated in law in Paris.

Quote: “Europe is in grave danger of losing its vitality because of its dropping birthrate, crime, drugs and AIDS.”