Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of the French far-right

Jean-Marie Le Pen founded the French far-right in the 1970s and launched a serious challenge for the presidency. But it wasn’t until he handed the reins to his daughter that his rebranding party took notice.

He died at the age of 96, his family said.

Le Pen’s supporters saw him as a charismatic defender of every man who is not afraid to speak out on tough topics.

And for several decades, he was considered the most controversial political figure in France.

His critics denounced him as a far-right fanatic, and he was convicted several times by the courts for radical statements.

A Holocaust denier and unabashed extremist on issues of race, gender and immigration, he has dedicated his political career to pushing himself and his views into the French political mainstream.

The so-called devil of the republic came second in the 2002 French presidential election, but was decisively defeated. This devil had to be expelled from the National Front if it was going to move on – a process that came to be known as ‘de-demonisation’.

For his part, the five-time presidential candidate, who began his political career fighting both communists and conservatives, called himself “ni droite, ni gauche, français” — neither right nor left, but French.

And all the French had their own opinion about Le Pen. In 2015, Marine Le Pen expelled her father from the National Front, which he founded four decades earlier.

“Perhaps, by getting rid of me, she wanted to make some kind of gesture towards the institution,” he would later tell the BBC’s Hugh Schofield.

“But think how much better off she would have been if she hadn’t kicked me out of the party!”

Jean-Marie Le Pen was born in the small Breton village of La Trinité-sur-Mer on June 20, 1928.

He lost his father at the age of 14 when his fishing boat hit a German mine. Le Pen became a Worth the nation – the term French authorities use for someone who has had a parent wounded or killed in war – which qualifies him for public funding and support.

Two years later, he tried to join the French Resistance, but was rejected. In his autobiography, he wrote that his first “combat award” was a “slap of duty” from his mother when he came home and told her what he had tried to do.

In 1954, Le Pen joined the French Foreign Legion. He was sent to Indochina – modern-day Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, then controlled by France – and two years later to Egypt, when France, Britain and Israel invaded the country in an attempt to take control of the Suez Canal. Both conflicts ended in defeat for the French.

But his time in Algeria shaped much of his politics and career.

He was assigned there as an intelligence officer when the Algerians fought a brutal but ultimately successful war of independence against Paris.

Le Pen viewed the loss of Algiers as one of the greatest betrayals in French history, fueling his hatred of World War II hero and then-president Charles de Gaulle, who ended the war for the colony.

During that war of independence, he allegedly participated in the torture of Algerian prisoners, which he has always denied.

Decades later, he unsuccessfully sued two French newspapers, Le Canard enchaîné and Libération, for publishing the allegations.

Le Pen was first elected to the French parliament in 1956 for the party led by militant right-wing shopkeeper leader Pierre Poujad. But they fell out, and Le Pen briefly returned to the army in Algeria. By 1962 he had lost his seat in the National Assembly and was to spend the next decade in the political wilderness.

During a period in 1965 as campaign manager for far-right presidential candidate Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancourt, Le Pen defended Marshal Pétain’s wartime government, which supported the occupation forces of Nazi Germany.

“Was General de Gaulle braver than Marshal Pétain in the occupied zone? It is not sure. It was much easier to resist in London than to resist in France.” he said.

It was during that election campaign that he lost the sight in his left eye. He wore an eyepatch for several years, which gave rise to stories about a political fight. In reality, he lost it while setting up his tent.

“While wielding the hammer…shock in the eye, I have to be hospitalized. Retinal Detachment”, he will write in his memoirs years later.

Le Pen’s political ascension really began only in 1972. That year he created National Front (FN), a far-right party created to unify the nationalist movement in France.

At first, the party did not have much support. Le Pen ran for president in 1974 for the FN, but won less than 1% of the vote. In 1981, he couldn’t even get enough signatures on his nomination form to run.

But the party gradually won over voters with its increasingly harsh anti-immigration policies.

In particular, the south of France – where a large number of North African immigrants settled – began to fall behind the FN. In the 1984 European elections, she won 10% of the vote.

Le Pen himself won a seat in the European Parliament, which he would hold for more than 30 years.

As a member of the European Parliament, he expressed his hatred for the European Union and what he saw as its interference in French affairs. He would later call the euro “the currency of occupation.”

But the growth of political wealth did not prevent him from expressing shocking views.

In an infamous interview in 1987, he downplayed the Holocaust, the killing of six million Jews by Nazi Germany. “I am not saying that there were no gas chambers. I have never seen them personally,” he said in an interview. “I’ve never really studied the matter, but I believe they are details in the history of the Second World War.”

His comments about detail will follow for the rest of his career.

Despite the controversy, his popularity grew. In the 1988 presidential election, he won 14% of the vote. In 1995, this figure rose to 15%.

Then came 2002. Jean-Marie Le Pen stormed into the second and final round of the presidential election, with many of the main candidates splitting support from the opposition.

The result caused a shock in French society. More than a million demonstrators took to the streets to oppose Le Peng’s ideas.

The far-right politician was so disliked by the majority that parties across the political spectrum called on their supporters to back President Jacques Chirac for a second term. Chirac won 82% of the vote, the largest victory in French political history.

In 2007, Le Pen would run for the presidency again, but by then his political star had faded. Le Pen, at the time the oldest candidate ever to run for president, finished fourth.

Months after that vote, President-elect Nicolas Sarkozy, whom Le Pen called a “foreigner” because of his Greek, Jewish and Hungarian ancestry, seized on the FN’s main campaign themes of national security and immigration in the legislative elections, openly saying, that intends to go to the vote of the FN.

This swept the rug out from under FN. Le Pen’s party failed to win a single seat in the National Assembly and, weighed down by financial problems, he announced plans to sell his party headquarters outside Paris.

In 2011, he resigned as party leader and was replaced by his daughter Marin.

Father and daughter quarreled almost immediately. Marine Le Pen has consciously moved away from her father’s more extreme policies to make her more attractive to Eurosceptic voters.

Then the relationship was irretrievably broken.

In 2015, Jean-Marie Le Pen repeated detail, his Holocaust denial in a radio interview. After months of bitter legal wrangling, FN party members eventually voted to expel their own founder.

Two years later, during her presidential campaign, Marin changed the name of the party to National Assemblyor the National Rally.

Her father condemned the move as suicide.

But Jean-Marie Le Pen remained unrepentant.

“The detail was in 1987. She then returned in 2015. It’s not every day!” he said in an interview with the BBC in 2017.

He even appeared to be upbeat about the rift with his family – at least publicly.

“This is life! Life is not a smooth, quiet flow,” he said.

“I’m used to adversity. For 60 years I rowed against the current. Not once did we have the wind at our backs! No, we never got used to one thing – to an easy life!”