Le Pen looked bad, but he was largely harmless. His voters could not reliably be counted for either the left or the right, and, in a partly first-past-the-post system, did not really matter. What counted to gain actual power was the relative ratio of the left vs the right, excluding the Front National. There was a sort of cordon sanitaire, and one of Chirac's better sides was his staunch refusal to have anything to do with Le Pen (even if it should be noted that his 2002 campaign was a really nasty fearmongering one).

Now, Le Pen's ideas have been swallowed and promoted by the right, and brought into the mainstream. And that's better?

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes