14 Facts About Jacques Isorni

Jacques Isorni came to prominence for his role as defending counsel in a number of cases involving prominent figures on the far right as well as for his own involvement in right wing politics.

Jacques Isorni was the son of Antoine Isorni, a native of Locarno who emigrated to France to make his way an artist in the fashionable Rive Gauche area of Paris, and Marguerite Feine, the daughter of a Catholic family who embraced republicanism and was noted as a Dreyfusard.

Jacques Isorni's parents married only three weeks after they first met and Feine's whirlwind marriage to an immigrant scandalised her traditionalist family.

The young Isorni was raised in the high end Faubourg Saint-Germain district, although he found himself a regular target for scorn from his schoolmates due to his Italian roots and unusual surname.

Jacques Isorni followed his father politically by associating himself with conservatism and whilst attending the Ecole Alsacienne he became involved in groups affiliated to Action Francaise.

Jacques Isorni studied a joint honours degree in law and literature at the University of Paris and was sworn in as a lawyer in 1931, making him the youngest practising lawyer in France at the time.

Jacques Isorni quickly built a reputation as a highly innovative lawyer with a high success rate in his cases.

Jacques Isorni came to wider prominence in the immediate post-war years when he was chosen to defend Robert Brasillach and then Petain himself in their trials for collaboration with Nazi Germany.

Nonetheless Jacques Isorni quickly became associated with a new tendency that sought to defend the reputation of Petain and the Vichy period and he became a regular writer for Rene Malliavin's Ecrits de Paris, a journal dedicated to this cause.

Jacques Isorni helped establish, and became leader of, the Union des nationaux independants et republicains, a political party that supported Petainisme and he ran as a candidate for this group in Paris during the 1951 elections.

Jacques Isorni initially been reluctant to enter electoral politics but was eventually persuaded to stand as a candidate by Pierre-Etienne Flandin, who pointed out that Jacques Isorni was one of the few prominent Petainists who was not barred from candidacy.

Whilst campaigning Jacques Isorni had a young Jean-Marie Le Pen as his personal bodyguard.

In parliament Jacques Isorni came under the wing of the Parti Paysan, a rural conservative group that subsequently formed part of the National Centre of Independents and Peasants, and became known as one of its most vocal, as well as its most right-wing, members.

That same year Jacques Isorni was the driving force behind the Association for the Defence of the Memory of Marshal Petain, a group that campaign for the "Hero of Verdun" to be released from prison.