Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of France’s post-war far right, passes away at the age of 96

The founder of France’s far-right National Front party, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who took pleasure in downplaying the Holocaust and appealed to blue-collar resentment over immigration and globalization, passed away on Tuesday at the age of 96.

His daughter Marine Le Pen’s political party, National Rally (Rass emblement National), confirmed his death.

Jean-Marie Le Pen fought all of his life, whether it was as a soldier in France’s colonial wars, as the founder of the National Front in 1972, for which he stood in five presidential elections, or in his many and public conflicts with his daughters and ex-wife.

Le Pen was always surrounded by controversy; the National Front was plagued by his numerous convictions for inciting racial hate and endorsing war crimes.

For many, his claims that the Nazi occupation of France was “not especially inhumane” and that the Nazi gas chambers were “merely a detail” of World War Two history were disgusting.

Le Pen reiterated prior comments in the late 1990s when he remarked, “If you take a book of a thousand pages on World War Two, in which 50 million people died, the concentration camps occupy two pages and the gas chambers ten or fifteen lines, and that’s what one calls a detail.”

Outrage was sparked by the remarks, even in France, where police had arrested thousands of Jews who had been sent to the Auschwitz Nazi extermination camp.

President Emmanuel Macron remarked in response to Le Pen’s passing: “A historic figure of the far right, he played a role in the public life of our country for nearly seventy years, which is now a matter for history to judge.”

Le Pen’s 40-year career helped redefine French politics and, in some ways, predicted Donald Trump’s ascent to the White House by using unhappiness over immigration and job security.

In 2002, he advanced to a runoff for president but was defeated handily by Jacques Chirac. For the first time since Nazi collaborators took power in the 1940s, voters supported a mainstream conservative instead of the far right.

Le Pen, who tapped into the indignation of many Britons who subsequently chose to leave the EU, was the scourge of the European Union, which he seen as a supranational enterprise usurping the authority of country governments.

During a stopover in Kenya after returning from the French overseas territory of Mayotte, Marine Le Pen received the news of her father’s passing.

OVERSEAS LEGION

Jean-Marie Le Pen was born in 1928 in Brittany, studied law in Paris in the early 1950s, and was known for almost never going out on the town without getting into a fight. In 1953, he enlisted in the Foreign Legion and fought in Indochina as a paratrooper.

As a soldier in the then French-run region and an elected member of the French parliament, Le Pen spearheaded a campaign to maintain Algeria’s French identity. Although he denied engaging in torture personally, he openly supported its use.

When a billionaire supporter left him a chateau outside of Paris and 30 million francs, or about 5 million euros ($5.2 million) in today’s currency, in 1977, his fortunes transformed after years on the outskirts of French politics.

Despite being rejected by mainstream parties, they assisted Le Pen in advancing his political goals.

He told a far-right publication, “Lots of enemies, few friends, and honor aplenty.” In his autobiography, he wrote: “No regrets.”

In order to get revenge on a guy she deemed aggressive, his wife eloped with his biographer in the 1980s while appearing half-naked in Playboy. Only when he consented to return her mother’s cremated remains did she return one of his spare glass eyes.

The National Front eventually swept through municipal, regional, and finally European elections by appealing to white working-class dissatisfaction with immigration and animosity toward the political and commercial elites in Paris.

Conventional parties used harder rhetoric on immigration in an attempt to regain support. Being strong on immigration and crime is increasingly more commonplace, and it helped conservative Nicolas Sarkozy win the presidency in 2007.

When Marine, Le Pen’s daughter, took over as party leader in 2011, she undertook a campaign to change the party’s long-held reputation as antisemitic and reposition it as a working-class champion.

She has advanced to and lost two runoffs for the presidency. She is the front-runner in the upcoming 2027 presidential election, according to opinion surveys.

Her father did not approve of the rebranding, and she had to kick him out of the party because of his divisive remarks and sniping.

Jean-Marie Le Pen called his daughter’s 2018 decision to rename the party National Rally a “betrayal” and advised her to get married in order to shed her family name.

He offered kind words for her after Macron beat her in 2022, despite the fact that their relationship remained challenging: “She did all she could, she did very well.”

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