“It was to be expected. This attack is probably the beginning of the beginning. It’s an episode in the war that is being waged against us by Islamism.

The blindness and deafness of our leaders, for years, is in part responsible for these kinds of attacks.” Although Le Pen and the National Front were frequent targets of Charlie Hebdo’s savage mockery, the two were at least as frequently aligned against shared political enemies.

As the French say, “the extremes touch,” and when it came to ridiculing the mainstream political parties—the center-left Socialists of President François Hollande and the center-right Gaullists of his predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy—it was often difficult to distinguish the grotesque caricatures you might find in Charlie Hebdo from those in National Front rhetoric. So, too, when it came to the xenophobia and racism of their anti-immigration polemics, and their baiting of Islamophobic and anti-Semitic sentiment. (Charlie Hebdo was merciless toward Christianity, too, but there Le Pen lost his sense of humor.)

Le Pen, the former fascist street fighter, relishes his role as a scourge of the establishment as much as the former Communist street fighters of Charlie Hebdo did, and he has always delighted in an opportunity to taunt his adversaries and critics. When I wrote about him in 1997, I reported that he had asked me, “What do I have to do not to be racist? Marry a black woman? With AIDS, if possible?” After the article appeared, he wrote to the magazine, complaining that, as “an Anglo-Saxon,” I had missed the Gallic subtlety of his wit: he had not said “une noire,” a black woman, but “un noir,” a black man.