Jean-Marie Le Pen founded the French far-right in the 1970s and mounted a strong challenge for the presidency. But it wasn’t until he handed over the reins to his daughter that his rebranded party saw power.
He died at the age of 96, his family announced.
Le Pen’s supporters saw him as a charismatic everyman advocate who is not afraid to talk about difficult topics.
And for several decades he was considered the most controversial political figure in France.
His critics denounced him as a far-right fanatic, and he was convicted several times by the courts for his radical statements.
A Holocaust denier and unrepentant extremist on issues of race, gender and immigration, he has devoted his political career to pushing himself and his views into the French political mainstream.
The so-called Devil from the Republic came second in the 2002 French presidential elections, but was convincingly defeated. This devil had to be removed from the National Front if it was to progress further – a process that became known as “de-demonisation”.
For his part, the five-time presidential candidate – who began his political career fighting communists and conservatives alike – described himself as “ni droite, ni gauche, français” – not right, not left, but French.
And all the French had their own opinion about Le Pen. In 2015, Marine Le Pen kicked her father out of the National Front he founded four decades ago.
“Maybe by getting rid of me, she wanted to make a gesture to the establishment,” he would later tell the BBC’s Hugh Schofield.
— But think how much better it would have been if she hadn’t excluded me from the party!
Student of the nation
Jean-Marie Le Pen was born in the small Breton village of La Trinité-sur-Mer on June 20, 1928.
He lost his father at the age of 14 when his fishing boat hit a German mine. Le Pen became Pupille de la Nation – the term used by the French authorities for those whose parent was wounded or killed in the war – entitling him to state support and aid.
Two years later, he tried to join the French resistance movement, but was rejected. In his autobiography, he wrote that his first “war decoration” was a “judge slap” from his mother, when he came home and told her what he had tried to do.
In 1954, Le Pen joined the French Foreign Legion. He was stationed in Indochina – present-day Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, then under French control – and then two years later in Egypt, when France, the United Kingdom and Israel invaded the country in an attempt to seize control of the Suez Canal. Both conflicts ended in French defeat.
But his time in Algeria shaped much of his politics and career.
He was posted there as an intelligence officer, when the Algerians fought a brutal but ultimately successful war of independence against Paris.
Le Pen saw the loss of Algeria as one of the greatest betrayals in French history, fueling his disdain for World War II hero and then-president Charles de Gaulle, who ended the war for the colony.
During that war for independence, he allegedly participated in the torture of Algerian prisoners, which he always denied.
Decades later, he would unsuccessfully sue two French newspapers, Le Canard enchaîné and Libération, for reporting on the allegations.
Political rise
Le Pen was first elected to the French parliament in 1956 in a party led by militant right-wing merchant leader Pierre Poujade. But they quarreled and Le Pen briefly returned to the army in Algeria. By 1962 he had lost his seat in the National Assembly and was to spend the next decade in the political wilderness.
During a period in 1965 as campaign manager for far-right presidential candidate Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour, Le Pen defended the wartime government of Marshal Pétain, which supported the occupation forces of Nazi Germany.
“Was General de Gaulle braver than Marshal Pétain in the occupied zone? That is not certain. It was much easier to resist in London than to resist in France,” he said.
It was during that election campaign that he lost the sight in his left eye. He wore an eyepatch for several years – prompting talk of a political showdown. In reality, he lost it while setting up the tent.
“While I’m swinging a hammer…shock in the eye, I have to go to the hospital. Detached retina,” he will write in his memoirs years later.
It wasn’t until 1972 that Le Pen’s political rise truly began. He founded that year Front National (FN), a far-right party created to unify the nationalist movement in France.
In the beginning, the party had little support. Le Pen ran for president of the FN in 1974, but won less than 1% of the vote. In 1981, he didn’t even manage to get enough signatures on his nomination form to run.
But the party gradually won over voters with its increasingly strident anti-immigrant policies.
Especially the south of France – where a large number of North African immigrants settled – began to fall behind the FN. In the 1984 European elections, she received 10% of the vote.
Le Pen himself won a seat in the European Parliament, which he will hold for more than 30 years.
As a member of the European Parliament, he expressed his hatred for the European Union and what he saw as its interference in French affairs. He would later call the euro the “currency of occupation”.
But his growing political wealth has not stopped him from expressing shocking views.
In a notorious interview in 1987, he downplayed the Holocaust – the killing of six million Jews by Nazi Germany. “I’m not saying that gas chambers didn’t exist. I’ve never seen them personally,” he said in an interview. “I have never studied the issue specifically, but I believe they are a point of detail in the history of the Second World War.”
His comments about le détail he would follow for the rest of his career.
Regardless of the controversy, his popularity grew. In the 1988 presidential election, he won 14% of the vote. This figure rose to 15% in 1995.
Then came 2002. With many of the main candidates splitting the opposition’s support, Jean-Marie Le Pen squeezed into the second and final round of the presidential election.
The result stirred French society. More than a million protesters took to the streets to oppose Le Pen’s ideas.
The far-right politician has caused such revulsion among the majority that parties across the political spectrum have called on their supporters to back President Jacques Chirac for a second term. Chirac won 82 percent of the vote, the largest victory in French political history.
Split with daughter
Le Pen would run for president again in 2007, but by then his political star had waned. Le Pen, then the oldest candidate ever to run for president, was fourth.
A few months after that vote, President-elect Nicolas Sarkozy – attacked by Le Pen as a “foreigner” because of his Greek, Jewish and Hungarian ancestry – seized on the FN’s main campaign themes of national security and immigration in the parliamentary elections, openly declaring that he intends to go for the votes of the FN.
He swept the rug from under FN. Le Pen’s party failed to win a single seat in the National Assembly, and he, driven by financial problems, announced the sale of his party headquarters outside Paris.
In 2011, he resigned as head of the party, and was replaced by his daughter Marina.
Father and daughter had an argument almost immediately. Marine Le Pen has consciously moved the party away from her father’s more extreme policies in order to make it more attractive to Eurosceptic voters.
Then the relationship broke irreparably.
In 2015, Jean-Marie Le Pen repeated detail, his Holocaust denial, in a radio interview. After months of bitter legal battles, members of the FN party eventually voted to oust their own founder.
Two years later, during her own presidential campaign, Marine changed the name of the party to National gatheringthat is, the National Assembly.
Her father condemned the move as suicidal.
But Jean-Marie Le Pen remained unrepentant.
“The detail was in 1987. Then it came back in 2015. It’s not every day!” he told the BBC in a 2017 interview.
He even appeared optimistic about the rift with his family – at least publicly.
“That’s life! Life is not a calm calm flow,” he said.
“I’m used to adversity. I’ve rowed against the current for 60 years. We’ve never had the wind at our backs! No, what we’ve never been used to is an easy life!”
