Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the far-right National Front party who tapped into working-class concerns over immigration and globalization and built a career on rhetoric that many saw as racist and xenophobic, has died aged 96.
His death was confirmed by his daughter Marine Le Pen’s political party, National Rally.
Jean-Marie Le Pen spent his life fighting, whether as a soldier in France’s colonial wars, as a founder of the National Front (for which he contested five presidential elections) or in feuds with his daughters and ex-wife, which were often conducted publicly.
Controversy was Le Pen’s constant companion. Accusations of racism, antisemitism and homophobia dogged the National Front after he co-founded the party in 1972.
In the early years of the AIDS crisis, Le Pen suggested that patients should be isolated in separate facilities.
He was tried, convicted and fined in 1996 for contesting war crimes after declaring the Nazi gas chambers were “merely a detail” of Second World War history and that the Nazi occupation of France was “not especially inhumane.”
Those comments provoked outrage in France, where police had rounded up thousands of Jews who were deported to the death camp at Auschwitz.
“I stand by this, because I believe it is the truth,” Le Pen said in 2015 when asked if he regretted the gas chamber comment, angering his daughter Marine in the process.
In more recent years, Le Pen made Islam and Muslim immigrants his primary target, blaming them for the economic and social woes of France. He once told the Associated Press he’d “despair if I found the culture of Brooklyn in France.”
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Marine Le Pen learned of her father’s death during a layover in Kenya as she returned from the cyclone-hit French overseas territory of Mayotte.
Jordan Bardella, chairman of the National Rally, praised him for having “always served France, defended its identity and its sovereignty.”
Commenting on Le Pen’s death, President Emmanuel Macron said: “A historic figure of the far right, he played a role in the public life of our country for nearly 70 years, which is now a matter for history to judge.”
A populist and fiery orator, Le Pen helped rewrite the parameters of French politics in a career spanning 40 years, riding waves of voter discontent and harnessing discontent over immigration and job security.
He reached a presidential election runoff in 2002 but lost by a landslide to Jacques Chirac, as voters chose to back a mainstream conservative rather than bring the far right back to power for the first time since Nazi collaborators ruled in the 1940s.
Le Pen was the scourge of the European Union, which he saw as a supranational project usurping the powers of nation states, tapping the kind of resentment felt by many Britons who later voted to leave the EU.
Born in Brittany in 1928, Le Pen studied law in Paris in the early 1950s and went on to join the Foreign Legion as a paratrooper fighting in Indochina in 1953.
Le Pen campaigned in the later 1950s to keep Algeria French, as an elected member of France’s parliament and a soldier in the then French-run territory. He publicly justified the use of torture but denied using such practices himself.
In his memoirs, he said he lost an eye in 1965 when, out campaigning for an extreme-right presidential candidate, the mainstay of a marquee tent snapped and whipped him in the face before a rally. By that time, he had formed a company with Léon Gaultier, once a soldier in the Waffen-SS for Nazi Germany, which sowed the seeds for the formation of the National Front.
After years on the periphery of French politics, Le Pen’s fortunes changed in 1977 when he was bequeathed a mansion outside Paris by a millionaire backer, along with 30 million francs, which is around five million euros ($7.4 million Cdn) in today’s money.
That allowed Le Pen to further his political ambitions and agenda despite being shunned by traditional parties.
His first wife, Pierrette Lalanne, eloped with his biographer in the 1980s, posing half-naked in Playboy to avenge a man she denounced as violent. She left Le Pen with one of his spare glass eyes and returned it only when he agreed to give her back her cremated mother’s ashes.
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Le Pen continued to tap white, working-class anger over immigration and resentment against the Paris-based business and political elites and the National Front surged in local, regional and then European elections.
Traditional parties sought to win back voters with tougher talk on immigration. This tactic helped conservative Nicolas Sarkozy secure the presidency in 2007, and being tough on crime and immigration is now more mainstream.
In 2011, after keeping a tight personal rein on the National Front, Le Pen was succeeded as party chief by daughter Marine, who campaigned to shed the party’s enduring image as antisemitic and rebrand it as a defender of the working class.
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Le Pen is survived by his wife Jeanne-Marie Paschos and three daughters: Marie-Caroline, Yann and Marine.
Marine Le Pen has reached two presidential election runoffs, losing to Macron both times. While she is a presumptive contender for the next presidential election, due in 2027, she also faces the prospect of a potential prison term and a ban on running for political office in an embezzlement case.
Yann Le Pen is also embroiled in that case, accused of using money destined for EU parliamentary aides to pay staff who instead did political work for the party between 2004 and 2016, in violation of the 27-nation bloc’s regulations. Jean-Marie Le Pen was deemed unfit to testify.