Born: June 20th, 1928
Died: January 7th, 2025
Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founding father of France’s modern political far right, who built a half-century career on rants of barely disguised racism, anti-Semitism and neo-Nazi propaganda, has died. He was 96.
An arm-waving reactionary with the swagger of a circus pitchman making outrageous claims, Le Pen ran unsuccessfully for the French presidency five times, making it to a runoff in 2002, riding waves of discontent and xenophobia and raising spectres of a new fascism as he excoriated Jews, Arabs, Muslims and other immigrants – anyone he deemed to be not “pure” French.
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Le Pen’s youngest daughter, Marine Le Pen, succeeded him as leader of the National Front in 2011 and rose to prominence on a tide of populist anger at the political mainstream. She was defeated in France’s presidential elections three times – in 2012, placing third with 17.9 per cent of the vote behind François Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy; in 2017, with 33.9 per cent, losing to centrist Emmanuel Macron; and in 2022, with 41.5 per cent, defeated again by Macron.
But that year’s elections also sent a record number of representatives from the party, renamed National Rally, to parliament – 89 in all – testimony to the success of Marine Le Pen’s efforts to normalise it and moderate its message in some regards.
By then it had became the leading opposition party, no longer an outcast widely viewed as a threat to the republic, and in 2024 the National Rally backed Macron’s bill restricting immigration, an embarrassment for the French president.
Voters in successively increasing numbers embraced Marine Le Pen’s right-wing messages that sought to exploit economic insecurity among the middle classes and resentment toward immigrants, themes pushed for years by her father.
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Trying to soften some of the toxic rhetoric of her father, whom she expelled from the party in 2015, Le Pen offered to accede to civil unions for same-sex couples, to accept unconditional abortions and withdraw the death penalty from her platform. And she publicly rejected Jean-Marie Le Pen’s anti-Semitism.
Marine Le Pen announced the party’s name change, to the National Rally, in 2018, although it decided to keep its logo of a red, white and blue flame. Jean-Marie Le Pen would have none of his daughter’s reforms. In 2016, he founded and became president of the Jeanne Committees, named after Joan of Arc, a new far-right political party.
He insisted that “the races are unequal”, that anyone with Aids was “a kind of leper” and that “Jews have conspired to rule the world”. He dismissed Adolf Hitler’s gas chambers as “a detail” of history and said that the wartime Nazi occupation of France was “not especially inhumane”.
Millions were repulsed by Le Pen’s statements. He was challenged by historians, denounced across the French political spectrum, including by mainstream conservatives, and convicted at least seven times of inciting racial hatred or distorting the historical record.
But he always had a strong core of followers, particularly in the country’s south. His prominence reflected not only the shockwaves of his oratory but also a political drift to the right in France and other parts of Europe during economic downturns and periods of rising inflation, crime and unemployment, as fears rose with the influx of immigrants from Africa and the Middle East.
His supporters were hardly a mass of anti-Semitic neo-fascists; many were just blue-collar workers, shopkeepers, unemployed young people and others facing bleak futures.
Le Pen had been a street fighter in his youth, and as the receding hair turned frosty he kept the pugnacious look of a brawler: the burly shoulders and jutting chin, the narrow eyes behind tortoise-rimmed spectacles, a grim mouth for the bad news and raised fists to deliver it forcefully. But the voice had range: needling, charming, whispering, condemning.
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He first appeared on the political scene in 1956, winning a National Assembly seat as a member of the anti-tax movement led by Pierre Poujade. From 1972, when he forged an alliance of extremist groups and founded his National Front party, to 2011, when he retired, he was the acknowledged leader of the far right in French politics, and his vociferous, sometimes violent followers were the principal opposition to the nation’s mainstream conservatives.
He insisted that he was not a racist, fascist or anti-Semite, though he shared the rhetoric of neo-Nazis, drew followers from reactionary elements and spoke often and crudely of racial characteristics. Some of his earliest colleagues in the National Front had been collaborators with the Nazis during the war.
A French court in 1987 convicted Le Pen of Holocaust denial for saying that Nazi gas chambers were “a detail” in history. He repeated the comment a decade later, and was convicted by a German court. In 2003, 2005, 2008 and 2011, he was convicted of inciting racial hatred against Muslims. In 2012, he was convicted of condoning war crimes for saying, in a 2005 newspaper interview, that “the German occupation was not especially inhumane”. His numerous convictions resulted in many heavy fines, but no jail time.
Jean-Marie Le Pen was born on June 20th, 1928, in La Trinité-sur-Mer, a seaside village in Brittany, to Jean Le Pen and Anne-Marie Hervé. His father, a fisherman, was killed when his boat was blown up by a mine in 1942. His mother was a seamstress of local ancestry. The boy was raised Roman Catholic and attended a Jesuit school in Vannes and a lycée at Lorient.
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Le Pen earned a law degree at the University of Paris, where he was active in right-wing politics, joined street brawls against Communist students and was repeatedly arrested. He claimed to have lost his left eye in an election brawl, but it was only damaged; he lost its vision later through illness.
As a Foreign Legion paratrooper in Indochina in 1954, Le Pen fought against the Communist-dominated Viet Minh. Later, as an intelligence officer in Algeria during its war of independence, he was accused of torturing members of the Algerian Front de Liberation Nationale. He was not prosecuted and denied the allegations of witnesses, but lost lawsuits against publications that cited them.
Le Pen became one of the youngest members of the National Assembly in 1956, but after campaigning against France’s withdrawal from Algeria, he lost the seat in 1962, when the colony achieved independence.
In 1960, he married Pierrette Lalanne. Besides Marine, they had two other daughters, Marie-Caroline and Yann, and were divorced in 1987. In 1991, he married Jeanne-Marie Paschos.