Jean-Marie Le Pen, who brought French far right into the mainstream, dies at 96

French politician Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of the National Front far-right party, has died at the age of 96.

In a statement to AFP, Le Pen's family said he had died on Tuesday while under medical care in the Paris region. "Jean-Marie Le Pen, surrounded by his family, was called to God this Tuesday at 12:00."

Le Pen's health had deteriorated in recent years and he had already been hospitalised several times.

In a statement, the Elysee Palace said that Le Pen was a "historical figure of the French far right" whose "role in the public life of our country for nearly 70 years [...] is now the subject of the judgment of history".

French Prime Minister Francois Bayrou said: “Jean-Marie Le Pen was a figure of French political life. When we fought him, we knew what a fighter he was.”

Leader of left-wing party France Unbowed (La France Insoumise, LFI), Jean-Luc Melenchon, said that while the "fight" against Jean-Marie Le Pen was now "over", the one "against hatred, racism, Islamophobia and antisemitism [...] continues."

During his career, Le Pen carved out a position in French politics and society as one of its most infamous politicians, who found support among voters for his racist and provocative rhetoric.

With the ascent of his daughter Marine Le Pen, with whom he had several deep political disagreements, he introduced a political dynasty into French politics.

Over the past decade, during which she distanced herself from her father, Marine has normalised discussion of far-right ideas in French political discourse and put her party at the heart of the country's political system.

But this would not have happened without the divisive politics and inflammatory rhetoric of Le Pen, who will continue to overshadow France and its people long after his death, and who for many was "the devil of the Republic".

Where was Jean-Marie Le Pen born?

Jean-Marie Le Pen was born on 20 June 1928 in La Trinite-sur-Mere, Brittany, into a Christian family whose surname translates as "the head" in Breton.

Later in life he was referred to by his entourage as  "The Menhir", an allusion to the megaliths that stand in his region of birth as well as his own reference to his political longevity.

In 1942 his father, a fisherman, died aboard his trawler, leaving his son a ward of the state. By 1944, at the age of 16, Le Pen had tried to join the resistance in Occupied France against the German forces but was rejected because of his age.

After studying at a Jesuit college in the Breton town of Vannes, he then attended two high schools, from both of which he was expelled for indiscipline. He eventually obtained his baccalaureate from a high school in Saint-Germain-en-Laye near Paris, before entering the Faculty of Law in the capital in 1948, from which he obtained a degree. (In 1971 he resumed his studies and earned a postgraduate diploma in political science).

Within a few months, Le Pen became a key figure in post-war Parisian student politics, building a reputation for leadership with his outspoken rhetoric.

In 1949, while president of the Corporate Association of Law Students, Le Pen’s oratory drew attention with a violent speech at a student union congress against the introduction of a "pre-salary" for students.

Although not a member of any party at the time, he was close to Action Francaise, a far-right nationalist and royalist political movement.

What did Le Pen do in Algeria?

After university, Le Pen hesitated between law and the military. Eventually he chose the latter and during the 1950s served as a volunteer reserve officer in the parachute regiment of the French Foreign Legion in France’s wars across its dying empire, first in Indochina in 1954-55, then in Algeria in 1956-57.

A fervent defender of French Algeria, Le Pen was repeatedly accused - as supported by archives as well as victims' and witnesses’ testimonies - of having practised torture as an intelligence officer during the Algerian War.

On several occasions, Le Pen admitted his role. “We were given a police mission and we accomplished it, according to an imperative of efficiency that requires illegal means,” he said in May 1957.

“If violence must be used to discover a nest of bombs, if one man must be tortured to save a hundred, torture is inevitable, and therefore, in the abnormal conditions in which we are asked to act, it is just.”

On 9 November 1962, as the war ended and impunity was guaranteed by an amnesty, he told the newspaper Combat: “I have nothing to hide. We tortured because it had to be done." He retracted his remarks the next day, stating that "The methods of constraint used...could never be equated with torture." 

Over the years, he systematically denied further accusations made against him, winning most of his libel cases.

When did Le Pen become an MP?

Le Pen began his political career as a member of Poujadism, a short-lived far-right political movement that disappeared in 1958. In 1956, aged 27, he became the youngest MP in France as an elected official in the Seine department, a mandate he held until 1962.

From there he led the campaign of far-right lawyer Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour during the 1965 presidential election.

Throughout his career, Le Pen was devoted to the defence of nationalist ideas: fighting immigration, defending France's identity and "national preference", whereby citizens are prioritised over migrants for family welfare benefits and other forms of state support.

Le Pen once summarised his  doctrine as "I love my daughters more than my nieces, my nieces more than my cousins, my cousins ​​more than my neighbours.”

From the 1970s, France closed its borders to economic immigration due to an economic crisis. Many migrants based in the country did not leave and instead had their families come join them. Le Pen began to highlight what he saw as a weak border policy which he linked to “the real breaking wave of immigration from the Third World” – workers from the former French colonies of North Africa.

In 1972, he co-founded the National Front (Front National, FN), and became the party's president.

His colleagues included former members of the Waffen-SS, the combat branch of the Nazi paramilitary, and the Organisation Armee Secrete (OAS or Secret Army Organisation), a French dissident paramilitary group which conducted violent action against Algerians fighting for independence during the war. 

The new party’s membership included people hostile to the independence of Algeria, those nostalgic for the World War Two collaborationist Vichy regime, traditionalist Catholics and nationalists from the neo-fascist movement New Order.

During the 1980s, Le Pen brought the National Front to the forefront of the political scene thanks to his electoral victories. 

He became more conscious of his public image, giving up his eye patch - he had lost his left eye during a campaign meeting in 1965 - for a glass eye in the early 1980s.

He became a member of the European Parliament in 1984, a position he held almost uninterrupted for more than three decades, which allowed him to forge links with groups from the European far-right such as the German neo-Nazi National Democratic Party (NPD) and the small Italian neo-fascist party Forza Nuova.

In 1986, he was re-elected as a member of parliament; he was also elected several times at municipal and regional levels, including as municipal councillor of the 20th arrondissement of Paris; and regional councillor of both Ile-de-France and then Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur.

When did Le Pen run for president?

But it was through presidential elections that Le Pen made his name both nationally and later internationally. He stood on five occasions, the first in 1974 when he was heavily defeated by Valery Giscard d'Estaing, but subsequently he was placed fourth in the first round of voting in 1988, 1995 and 2007.

Perhaps Le Pen’s greatest victory was in 2002, when he caused a shock by reaching the second round after beating the socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin.

In the second round he was matched against not only incumbent Jacques Chirac but also the French political class, as politicians from both left and right united to urge voters not to back the FN candidate. Le Pen lost and scored 17.8 percent of the vote.

In terms of foreign policy, Le Pen’s main ideologies were the fight against communism and the promotion of closer cooperation with the US.

For a long time he defended Israel but then after the collapse of east European communism in the late 1980s, he distanced himself from the country and its American support, denouncing the "American-Zionist axis" which led, according to him, to the first Gulf War in Iraq in 1991.

In November 1990, just weeks before the outbreak of that conflict, Le Pen went to Baghdad to negotiate directly with Saddam Hussein for the release of 55 European hostages, kidnapped when Iraq invaded Kuwait, whom he brought back to France. 

He made another visit to the country in 1996 to support Saddam against Western sanctions. His second wife, Jany, was the founder and president of SOS Enfants d'Irak, an NGO intended to help Iraqi children.

What were Le Pen’s inflammatory statements?

Le Pen's political career was punctuated by controversial statements that earned him accusations of racism and antisemitism, in particular, and often landed him in court.

One of the most infamous was made in September 1987, when he declared on French radio that the Nazis' use of gas chambers was "a minor detail in the history of the Second World War". For this he was fined nearly 1.2m francs in March 1991 for trivialising crimes against humanity.

But Le Pen still later justified himself by saying that extermination camps were not the only place where people lost their lives during the war, and again used the word "minor" in 1997, 2008 and 2009 to describe this period of history.

In January 2005, he stated in a far-right weekly that "the German occupation had not been particularly inhumane, even if there were blunders, which was inevitable in a country of 550,000 square meters." 

For that he received a three-month suspended prison sentence and a 10,000 euros fine for contesting crimes against humanity.

Le Pen also made statements on several occasions about the “threat” represented by migration from Africa. During a public meeting in May 2014, Le Pen spoke about the “risk of France being submerged by immigration” and suggested "Monsignor Ebola can resolve this in three months" - a reference to the lethal virus that was then spreading across the continent.

Islam and Muslims were also among his targets. Le Pen said in 2014 that “this phenomenon of mass immigration is aggravated in our country by a religious fact: a large part of these immigrants are Muslims, a religion which has a conquering vocation, all the more conquering because it feels strong and they feel numerous. 

“It goes so far as to conquer even in our own ranks - not in the FN but in France - many new followers."

In 1996, during a National Front party conference, he also declared: "I believe in racial inequality, yes of course, all history shows it, they do not have the same capacity or the same level of historical evolution."

But Le Pen’s statements did not come without cost to himself. He was found guilty several times of incitement to hatred, discrimination and racial violence, particularly against Jews and Muslims. 

For instance, in March 1989 the Paris Court of Appeal fined Le Pen 5,000 francs, after having described in 1984 as a "mortal danger… the hegemony resulting from the demographic explosion of the Third World, and in particular the Islamic-Arab world, which is currently penetrating our country". The judgment was later overturned on appeal.

In 2005, the Paris Court of Appeal also fined him 10,000 euros for incitement to racial hatred for having declared a year earlier: "The day when we will have in France, not five million but 25 million Muslims, it is they who will command. And the French will hug the walls, come down from the sidewalks with their eyes lowered."

In September 2018, he was indicted for racist defamation for having declared in 2009 that "90 percent of faits divers [incidents, crime news] originate from either an immigrant or a person of immigrant origin". He was eventually discharged in 2019.

Why did Le Pen fall out with his daughter Marine?

In 2011, Le Pen’s daughter Marine succeeded him as president of the National Front, of which he became honorary president. 

But the relationship between father and daughter deteriorated in subsequent years, as the new leader tried to distance herself from repeated statements that she feared harmed the image of the party, renamed in June 2018 as the National Rally (Rassemblement National or RN). 

In the summer of 2015, the leadership excluded Le Pen from the party he had founded, formalising the break with his daughter and starting a legal war between the two, as Le Pen contested his exclusion. 

He managed to stay honorary president thanks to a court decision, but was finally removed from the party in March 2018, when 79.9 percent of its members voted in favour of new statutes that abolished the position of honorary president.

In 2019, after 34 years in the European Parliament and 63 years after his first election as a French MP, Le Pen, at the age of 90, resigned as an MEP and ended his political career. 

What was Le Pen’s impact on French politics?

In almost 40 years as president of the National Front, Le Pen succeeded in rooting the far right in the French political landscape.

The media coverage of Le Pen’s speeches on immigration and border insecurity brought such issues into mainstream public debate from the early 1980s onwards. Some observers have even spoken of a "Lepenisation of minds": the gradual acceptance by the French of all or part of the ideas promoted by Le Pen.

His daughter Marine and his granddaughter Marion Marechal, daughter of another of his daughters, have since taken up the torch in what resembles a political dynasty, despite all its intra-family tensions.

While he described Marechal as an "exceptionally brilliant woman" in his memoirs, he made multiple criticisms about Marine in two volumes, Memoires: Fils De La Nation (2018); and Memoires: Tribun Du Peuple (2019).

Through these, Le Pen managed to rekindle the simmering rivalry between the RN leader and her niece, who went on instead to support far right politician Eric Zemmour in the 2022 presidential election.

"I feel sorry for her,” Le Pen said of his daughter, adding that she had a "dictatorial side", that "she cannot stand contradiction." Marine replied by saying: "The least we can say is that he is not a follower of self-criticism."

Marine pursued a policy of making the RN more palatable for mainstream voters, excluding party figures she considered too radical and distancing herself and the party from her father's most controversial positions, in particular his Holocaust denial.

This “de-demonisation” strategy as it is known has played a major role in her party’s electoral successes in recent years, and its voter base has expanded significantly.

Nicolas Lebourg, an expert on the far right, said in 2017: “The FN no longer needs to campaign; the other parties do it for it. This is a sign of a clear victory for cultural hegemony.” 

But it was all too much for Le Pen, who criticised his daughter for her "desperate search for de-demonisation at a time when the devil is becoming popular.”

Le Pen and his daughter were indicted in 2015 for  "misappropriation of public funds", amid allegations that non-existent FN parliamentary assistants were being paid to help the party’s MEPs.

The party leadership has denied the accusations and Marine denounced a "very violent attack on democracy" and a "political death sentence".

In recent years, Le Pen’s health deteriorated, including a stroke in 2022 and a heart attack the following year.

In February 2024, he was placed "under legal protection", a form of guardianship, at the request of his family, following his medical decline. And in July, the Paris judicial court said that Le Pen was not fit to prepare his defence and appear in court, and would instead be represented by his daughter Marie-Caroline.

In November 2024, Marine Le Pen, current leader of the far right in France, confirmed that the family had "concerns" about Le Pen's health, "because we love him".