For half a century, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the National Front founder who has died at the age of 96, remained on the far-right fringes of French politics — a xenophobe nostalgic about France’s colonial past and ambivalent about those who collaborated with the Nazis during the second world war.
But in the years that preceded his death, Le Pen’s nationalist, anti-immigration ideology found an increasingly loud echo in French angst about identity and industrial decline. That has helped his party, now led by his daughter Marine, reach the political mainstream and inspire other far-right politicians across Europe.
In presidential elections in 1974, two years after setting up the FN, Le Pen attracted less than 1 per cent of the popular vote.
In 2022, Marine Le Pen — who rebranded the party Rassemblement National, or National Rally — scored 41.5 per cent in the run-off vote won by Emmanuel Macron for his second term as president. In snap elections called by Macron in 2024, the party emerged as the single biggest 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 government.
“My ideas were ahead of their time,” Jean-Marie Le Pen said in 2018. “They are in tune with today’s realities, and it’s with pessimism that I see the demographic consequences that are leading to a global migratory breaking wave.”
Yet while his ideas gained ground, Le Pen long remained a political pariah in France. In 2002, when he unexpectedly qualified for the second round of presidential elections — at the expense of Socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin — there were mass protests against the far right throughout the country. Jacques Chirac, the centre-right incumbent, was re-elected with 82.2 per cent of the vote.
Le Pen’s antisemitic comments brought him constant legal trouble. Even his daughter resorted to expelling him from the party as she embarked on a “detoxification” ahead of her own presidential bid.
This did not stop the patriarch from venting his xenophobic views nor from criticising his daughter’s strategy.
“If you stop being the devil, if you ‘detoxify’, then you just become the rightwing [of the centre-right],” he told the Financial Times in a 2015 interview at his mansion in the wealthy Paris suburb of Saint-Cloud, which featured a life-size painting of him dressed as a pirate. “There is no longer a raison d’être for the FN.”
Le Pen always viewed himself as an outsider who enjoyed a fight. Reminiscing about street brawls that would frequently erupt against communist sympathisers in his youth, he said with a chuckle: “Back then, if you received a blow, you would give it back. You wouldn’t go to the police and file a complaint like nowadays. It was a more virile civilisation.”
This rebellious mentality partly stemmed from a rough upbringing in La Trinité-sur-Mer, a seaside town in southern Brittany. Le Pen was born on 20 June 1928 — under the Chinese zodiac sign of the Dragon, he wrote in his memoir in 2018. The village house that his farmer parents shared with another family had a dirt floor. As was often the case in Catholic families, Le Pen was an altar boy. Later, he paid for his law degree in Paris by working on the side as a postman, coal miner and fisherman.
The second world war made him a fierce patriot. His father died in 1942, when his fishing boat was blown up by a mine. Le Pen said he thought about 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 memoir. After the war, he directed his ire at Charles de Gaulle.
He aimed to become an “absolute” opponent to the general who had fled to London and organised French resistance to German occupation, accusing him of “selling off the [colonial] empire” and shrinking France.
“In reality, there are two de Gaulles — the rebel of 1940 and the hunter of rebels [French soldiers opposed to Algerian independence] in 1961. Both form one false great man whose destiny was to help France become small,” wrote Le Pen. He complained about the unfair treatment of Philippe Pétain, the military marshal and hero of the first world war, who in 1945 was convicted of treason for leading the Vichy collaborationist regime during the second world war.
Decolonisation fuelled Le Pen’s nationalistic ideals. He enrolled as a French soldier in the Indochina and Algeria independence wars, and afterwards alluded to torture by French forces in his descriptions of how he and others interrogated Algerian suspects.
“As I was growing up and rising in prominence, my country was shrinking to the point of changing completely, in a manner unseen in 2,000 years of history,” he wrote. “This strange phenomenon has been the fuel of my political life and the sorrow of my life.”
In 1956, he won his first election as an MP for French populist politician Pierre Poujade, who led an anti-tax, anti-immigration and anti-establishment party of shopkeepers.
Far-right parties joined forces in 1972 under the newly established Front National and chose Le Pen as its head. Four years later, his Parisian apartment was blown up with dynamite. The perpetrators were never found.
Le Pen made controversy his political trademark. On a television show in 1987, he played down the Nazi gas chambers as “a detail of the second world war”. In 2009, he was convicted of contesting crimes against humanity during the Nazi occupation. French authorities also suspected he was hiding several million euros in Switzerland.
Over the years, he increasingly directed his anger at Muslim immigrants, warning of a looming clash of civilisations and embracing the idea of the “great replacement”, a theory popular in far-right circles about a supposed conspiracy to supplant whites with immigrant Muslims. (France has the largest population of Muslims in western Europe, numbering around a tenth of the 66mn population, according to statistics.)
“When there’s one immigrant family in your building, no problem, but when there are three, four, five, you become a minority in your own country,” he told the FT in his office filled with books, statues of Joan of Arc — a Catholic who fought against English invaders — and model ships.
In his old age, Le Pen criticised his daughter Marine’s policies, including her embrace of Gaullist economics in which the state ought to play a prominent role. He made clear he felt closer to his granddaughter and Marine’s niece, Marion Maréchal, a conservative Catholic who was an FN MP between 2012 and 2017 and split with the party by supporting another far-right presidential candidate, Éric Zemmour, in 2022.
Under Marine Le Pen, however, the party is closer to the Élysée than ever ahead of elections due in 2027.
When he wrote his memoirs, Jean-Marie Le Pen had few regrets about his political career: “I can admit to it, touching wood: I have had a nice life.”