THE French Government threatened yesterday to prosecute Jean-Marie Le Pen, the far-Right leader, for declaring that the wartime Nazi occupation of France was not harsh.

M Le Pen, 76, leader of the National Front party, had attracted a chorus of indignation from the political world and media on Wednesday with a magazine interview in which he said that the 1940-44 occupation was “not especially inhumane”, and that the Gestapo largely worked to protect the French population.

The massacres of the French population during the war consisted of a few “blunders” by the occupiers, he told Rivarol, an extreme right-wing magazine. Yesterday, he repeated his opinion and said that government threats to prosecute him were aimed at sabotaging his campaign against Europe’s new constitution in this summer’s French referendum.

“They want to disqualify the advocates of a ‘no’ vote because the supporters of a ‘yes’ vote are afraid of failure . . . They want to gag the National Front at the opening of a referendum campaign that will decide the life or death of France,” M Le Pen said. All mainstream parties support the EU constitution. Opposition is led by the far Right and Left.

Clearly enjoying his return to the limelight, M Le Pen said that he stood by his words. “I note that if one compares the German occupation of France with the occupation in certain other European countries, then proportionately it is in France where it was the least painful.

“It is scandalous that, 60 years after the war, one is not allowed to express oneself in a coherent and calm way on these subjects,” he said.

Dominique Perben, the Justice Minister, said that M Le Pen had clearly breached the law banning denial of Nazi crimes against humanity. M Le Pen “must explain himself before a court,” M Perben said.

Party leaders called the remarks unspeakable and the media noted that M Le Pen was reverting to his past form, provoking outrage to win publicity.

Nicolas Sarkozy, leader of President Chirac’s Union for a Popular Movement, said that M Le Pen should answer in the criminal courts. M Le Pen’s remarks were judged especially offensive as Europe marks the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

M Le Pen, who reached the run-off vote against Jacques Chirac in the 2002 presidential elections, earned notoriety in the 1970s and 1980s by playing to fascists and nostalgists with outrageous claims about the war. In recent years, he has curbed his tongue as he tried to recast himself as a mainstream politician.

In the 1980s he was widely condemned for calling the Nazi slaughter of the Jews “a detail of history”.

France has since toughened its laws against Holocaust denial. Legal experts said that M Le Pen, a lawyer by training, could probably not be convicted of any offence because he was expressing a general view rather than denying the Holocaust.

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