Jean-Marie Le Pen, father of the French far right, is dead at 96

“Over the course of six decades of active political combat, he proved to be a visionary, forcing into the public debate the major issues that structure political life today, such as demographics and its corollary immigration, globalization and France’s decline, national sovereignty and the risk of dilution in the European Union,” the party he founded, now known as the National Rally, said in a glowing statement that largely glossed over controversies during Le Pen’s life.

“For the National Rally, he will be remembered as the man who, in the storms, held the flickering flame of the French nation in his hands,” the statement read.

Figures from across the political spectrum weighed in, with those on the left condemning what Le Pen stood for as his allies on the far right praised his legacy. Centrists struck a neutral tone, in some cases just effectively acknowledging his existence.

“He played a role in the public life of our country for almost seventy years, which is now a matter for history to judge,” the ´Élysée palace said in a statement.

The current head of the National Rally, Jordan Bardella, said on X that Le Pen “always served France, its identity and its sovereignty.” Bardella had on previous occasions sought to distance himself from the elder Le Pen, whose ultranationalist, anti-immigrant, elite-bashing made him a pariah in 1980s France.

Le Pen was, arguably, two or three decades ahead of his time. He prefigured the divisive populist politics of President Donald Trump in the United States, Nigel Farage and Britain’s other prominent Brexit campaigner, and Éric Zemmour in his own country.

Le Pen’s family quarrels were legendary. His estranged first wife posed nude for Playboy magazine to embarrass him when his political career was taking off. The youngest of his three daughters, Marine, took over his party, the National Front, in 2011, but later kicked him out while trying to make the movement seem respectable.

Marine Le Pen learned of her father’s death on a layover in Kenya as she returned from a visit to the cyclone-ravaged French overseas territory of Mayotte, according to journalists traveling with her.

Le Pen’s granddaughter, Marion Maréchal, daughter of Marine’s older sister Yann, took the Le Pen political soap opera into a new generation endorsing Zemmour over her aunt during the first round of the presidential election in 2022 — only to publicly abandon Zemmour two years later.

After years of languishing on the political fringes, Jean-Marie Le Pen sent shockwaves through France and beyond in 2002 by reaching the two-candidate second round of a French presidential election — only to be crushed 82 percent to 18 percent by Jacques Chirac. This was the high point of his career. The many low points included more than a score of convictions for Holocaust denial, inciting racial hatred and homophobia.

Le Pen was one of the greatest French political orators of recent times, moving fluently from elegant, booming sentences to vulgar brutality. This was a gift that he frequently abused. Although he denied being anti-Semitic, he was repeatedly drawn to anti-Semitic tropes and allusions.

His most celebrated — or infamous — conviction was for dismissing the Nazi gas chambers as only a “detail” of World War II.

From young Jean to Jean-Marie

Jean-Marie Le Pen was born to a modest family in La Trinité-sur-Mer in Brittany on June 20, 1928. His mother was a dressmaker, his father a fisherman who was killed when his trawler netted a mine in 1942. The tragedy gave young Jean (as he then was) additional educational opportunities as a pupille de la nation (pupil of the nation) — or child of a victim of war.

Originally Jean Louis Marie Le Pen, he changed his name to Jean-Marie to attract Catholic voters during his first parliamentary election campaign in 1956. He was elected as a supporter of Pierre Poujade, head of an ephemeral shopkeepers’ and artisans’ movement whose name — “Poujadisme” — is still a byword for grass-roots, anti-state and anti-elite politics in France and beyond.

Le Pen rapidly lost patience with Poujade, and returned to the army for six months — volunteering to fight in the Algerian war of independence.

Le Pen was later dogged by allegations that he had tortured prisoners during the Battle of Algiers in 1956-57. His most recent biographers Pierre Péan and Philippe Cohen, in “Le Pen, Une histoire française” (2012), concluded that he “beat up” prisoners rather than tortured them.

It is worth recording, as an example of the complexity of Le Pen’s personality, that he was praised by superiors and enemies alike as one of the French officers who allowed dead rebels to be buried according to Islamic rites. Some others threw their enemies into the sea.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Le Pen graduated through a bewildering series of minority parties to become the would-be “federator” of the nationalist opposition to Charles de Gaulle. He was twice arrested but never convicted for his alleged links with subversive movements opposing de Gaulle’s decision to give Algeria its independence in 1962. Many nationalists, including Le Pen, already detested de Gaulle for setting himself up in London in 1940 as the “true France” in opposition to the collaborationist regime of Philippe Pétain in Vichy.

Le Pen finally formed the National Front (FN) in 1972, two years after de Gaulle’s death, from a ragbag of mutually loathing political tribes: extreme, conservative Catholics; royalists; Vichy-apologists; ex-French-Algerian colonists; pagans; white supremacists; and covert neo-Nazis.

One of his co-founders, Léon Gaultier, had been an Untersturmführer in a French volunteer unit of Adolf Hitler’s SS. Le Pen himself always denied any ideological kinship with Nazism or fascism, preferring to see himself as the descendant of an older, purely French current of extreme nationalist opinion.

Le Pen denied that he or his party were racist. Other races were fine, he said, so long as they lived in other countries. However, FN literature was stuffed with essays on racial purity with images that portrayed typical French men and women as blonde with blue eyes.

In his first presidential campaign in 1974, Le Pen won just 0.75 percent of the vote. He was long seen as a marginal player — even a figure of fun. In public appearances and on TV, he wore a black eye-patch following a banal accident with a tent poll in the 1960s.

Le Pen’s political prospects were transformed in the next decade by three developments: the end of the “30 glorious years” of the French post-war economic boom; the collapse of traditional coal and steel industries; and increased migration from North Africa. He built new support among ex-communist and socialist, blue-collar workers in the east and north to add to his pied noir (former North Africa white colonist) and ex-Vichyist bases in the southeast.

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By 1995, he had converted this slogan into an attack on the “metropolitan and cosmopolitan” elites, who he said allegedly conspired against the French nation.

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Le Pen never held real power. His own party eventually disavowed him. But his political legacy was significant and may, in fact, still be a work in progress.

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Victor Goury-Laffont contributed to this report.