For half a century, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the National Front who has died aged 96, remained on the far-right fringes of French politics — a xenophobe nostalgic for France’s colonial past and ambivalent about those who collaborated with the Nazis during World War II.
But in the years leading up to his death, Le Pen’s nationalist, anti-immigration ideology found an increasingly loud echo in French anxieties about identity and industrial decline. This helped his party, now led by his daughter Marine, reach the political mainstream and inspire other far-right politicians across Europe.
In the 1974 presidential election, two years after the founding of the FN, Le Pen received less than 1 percent of the vote.
In 2022, Marine Le Pen — who renamed the party Rassemblement National or National Rally — won 41.5 percent in the second round of voting that Emmanuel Macron won for his second presidential term. In a snap election called by Macron in 2024, the party became the largest force in France’s lower house, the National Assembly.
Elsewhere in Europe, like-minded politicians have also made strong electoral gains and in some cases entered and led the government.
“My ideas were ahead of their time,” said Jean-Marie Le Pen in 2018. “They are in line with today’s reality and I look pessimistically at the demographic consequences leading to a global migration wave.”
Yet while his ideas gained momentum, Le Pen remained a political pariah in France for a long time. In 2002, when he unexpectedly qualified for the second round of the presidential election – at the expense of Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin – there were mass protests against the far right across the country. Jacques Chirac, the current center-right president, was re-elected with 82.2 percent of the vote.
Le Pen’s anti-Semitic comments brought him constant legal problems. Even his daughter resorted to kicking him out of the party as she embarked on a “detox” ahead of her own presidential bid.
This did not prevent the patriarch from expressing his xenophobic views or from criticizing his daughter’s strategy.
“If you stop being a devil, if you ‘detox’ yourself, then you simply become right-wing [of the centre-right]”, he told the Financial Times interview from 2015 in his mansion in the wealthy Paris suburb of Saint-Cloud, which featured a life-size picture of him dressed as a pirate. “There is no longer a raison d’être for the FN.”
Le Pen has always seen himself as an outsider who enjoys fighting. Recalling the street fights that often broke out against communist sympathizers in his youth, he said with a laugh: “Back then, when he received a blow, he would fight back. You wouldn’t go to the police and file a report like today. It was a more masculine civilization.”
This rebellious mentality came in part from a rough upbringing in La Trinité-sur-Mer, a seaside town in southern Brittany. Le Pen was born on June 20, 1928 — under the Chinese zodiac sign of the Dragon, he wrote in his 2018 memoir. The country house his farmer parents shared with another family had a dirt floor. As was often the case in Catholic families, Le Pen was the altar boy. Later, he paid for his law degree in Paris by working on the side as a postman, miner and fisherman.
World War II made him a fierce patriot. His father died in 1942, when his fishing boat blew up a mine. Le Pen said he considered killing a German soldier in revenge, and at one point tried to join the French resistance. But he also resented France’s British allies, responsible for reducing local towns to rubble, he wrote in his memoirs. After the war, he directed his anger at Charles de Gaulle.
He intended to become an “absolute” opponent of the general who fled to London and organized the French resistance to the German occupation, accusing him of “selling [colonial] empire” and less and less France.
“In reality there are two de Gaulles – the rebel of 1940 and the hunter of rebels. [French soldiers opposed to Algerian independence] 1961. Both make one fake big man whose destiny was to help France become small,” Le Pen wrote. He complained about the unfair treatment of Philippe Pétain, the military marshal and hero of the First World War, who was convicted of treason in 1945 for leading the Vichy collaborationist regime during the Second World War.
Decolonization fueled Le Pen’s nationalist ideals. He enlisted as a French soldier in the Indochina and Algerian wars of independence, and subsequently alluded to torture by French forces in his descriptions of how he and others interrogated Algerian suspects.
“As I grew up and became more famous, my country shrank to the point of complete change, in a way not seen in 2,000 years of history,” he wrote. “This unusual occurrence has been the fuel of my political life and the sorrow of my life.”
In 1956, he won his first election as a Member of Parliament for the French populist politician Pierre Poujade, who led an anti-tax, anti-immigration and anti-establishment merchant party.
Far-right parties joined forces in 1972 under the newly founded Front National and elected Le Pen as leader. Four years later his apartment in Paris was blown up with dynamite. The perpetrators were never found.
Le Pen has made controversy her political trademark. In a television show in 1987, he downplayed the Nazi gas chambers as a “detail of the Second World War.” In 2009, he was convicted for challenging crimes against humanity during the Nazi occupation. The French authorities also suspected that he was hiding several million euros in Switzerland.
Over the years, he has increasingly focused his anger on Muslim immigrants, warning of a looming clash of civilizations and espousing the idea of the “great replacement,” a theory popular in far-right circles about an alleged plot to replace whites with Muslim immigrants. (France has the largest Muslim population in Western Europe, about a tenth of its 66 million inhabitants, according to statistics.)
“When there’s one immigrant family in your building, there’s no problem, but when there’s three, four, five, you become a minority in your own country,” he told the FT in his office full of books, statues of Joan of Arc… a struggling Catholic against the English invaders — and ship models.
In his old age, Le Pen criticized his daughter Marina’s policies, including her embrace of a Gaullist economy in which the state should play a prominent role. He made it clear that he feels closer to his granddaughter and Marine’s niece, Marion Maréchal, a conservative Catholic who was an FN MP between 2012 and 2017 and broke with the party to support another far-right presidential candidate, Éric Zemmour, in 2022 . year.
However, under the leadership of Marine Le Pen, the party is closer to the Elysee Palace than ever ahead of the 2027 election.
When he wrote his memoirs, Jean-Marie Le Pen had few regrets about his political career: “I can admit it, knock on wood: I had a nice life.”
