Jean-Marie Le Pen, the leader of the French far-right, has died at the age of 96

Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founding father of France’s modern political far right, who built a half-century career on rants about racism, anti-Semitism and neo-Nazi propaganda, has died. He was 96 years old.

His death was confirmed On X Written by Jordan Bardella, current president of the party founded by Mr. Le Pen. Le Pen’s family said, in a statement to Agence France-Presse, that he died on Tuesday in a hospital in Garches, west of Paris.

In April 2024, when Mr. Le Pen was in frail health after suffering a second heart attack within a year, a French court granted his two daughters legal guardianship, giving them the right to make decisions in his name.

An arm-waving reactionary who swaggered like a circus man and made outrageous claims, Mr. Le Pen ran unsuccessfully for the French presidency five times, reaching a runoff in 2002, riding waves of discontent and xenophobia and raising the specter of a new fascism. He would also attack Jews, Arabs, Muslims and other immigrants – anyone he considered to be not a “pure” Frenchman.

Marine Le Pen, Mr. Le Pen’s youngest daughter, succeeded him as leader of the National Front in 2011, rising to prominence amid a wave of populist anger at the political mainstream. She was defeated in French presidential elections three times – in 2012, finishing third with 17.9% of the vote behind François Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy. 2017 by 33.9% He lost to the centrist Emmanuel Macron; In 2022, by 41.5 per cent, Mr Macron defeated her again.

But that year’s election also sent a record number of representatives of the party, renamed the National Rally, to Parliament — 89 in all — demonstrating that Ms. Le Pen’s efforts to normalize it and tone down its message were in some ways successful.

By then, it had become the main opposition party, no longer a pariah party widely viewed as a threat to the Republic, and in 2024, the National Rally Party He supported Mr. Macron’s bill restricting immigrationThis constitutes an embarrassment to the French president.

Political analysts said voters in ever-increasing numbers embraced Le Pen’s right-wing messages that sought to exploit economic insecurity among the middle classes and resentment toward immigrants, themes her father had pushed for years.

In an attempt to moderate some of the toxic rhetoric of her father, whom she expelled from the party in 2015, Le Pen has offered to join civil unions for same-sex couples, accept unconditional abortions and withdraw the death penalty from her election platform. She has publicly rejected Mr. Le Pen’s anti-Semitism.

Ms. Le Pen announced the party Change namejoined the National Rally, in 2018, although it decided to keep its logo of the red, white and blue flame. The rebranding was an additional effort to move away from the politics associated with her father, a long-time member of the European Parliament. Mr. Le Pen will have none of his daughter’s fixes. In 2016, he founded and became president of Jeanne d’Arc, named after Joan of Arc, a new far-right political party embodying his old ideologies.

He insisted that “the races are unequal,” that anyone with AIDS is “a kind of leper,” and that “the Jews conspired to rule the world.” He described America as a “mongrel nation,” dismissed Hitler’s gas chambers as a “hinge” of history, and said the Nazi wartime occupation of France “was not particularly inhumane.”

In fact, 76,000 Jews in France were deported to death camps during the Nazi occupation from 1940 to 1944, in cooperation with the Vichy French government. Only 2,500 survived. In 1944, a Nazi convoy entered the village of Oradour-sur-Glane, arresting and massacring 642 residents in France’s worst atrocity of the war. Thousands of civilians were killed by the German army as the war approached its end.

Mr. Le Pen’s statements shocked millions. He has been challenged by historians, condemned by the French political spectrum, including conservatism, and convicted at least seven times of inciting racial hatred or distorting the historical record.

But with his daughter’s successes, many analysts have come to recognize the influence of some of Le Pen’s views, especially on immigration. He has always enjoyed a strong core of followers, especially in the south of the country. His fame reflected not only the shock waves of his rhetoric, but also a political drift to the right in France and other parts of Europe during economic recessions and periods of high inflation, crime and unemployment, with concerns growing with the influx of migrants from Africa and Europe. The Middle East.

Le Pen’s most notable success in the presidential race came in 2002, when he defeated the Socialist candidate, Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, in the first round of voting, and then came in second place in the general elections, defeating the incumbent president. President Jacques Chirac. But he got about 18 percent of the votes.

His supporters were not a bloc of anti-Semitic neo-fascists; Many were just blue-collar workers, shopkeepers, unemployed youth and others facing a bleak future in a nation whose tight labor markets, underperforming schools, housing shortages, and spontaneous politicians left them frustrated and angry.

Mr. Le Pen had been a street fighter in his youth, and while his flowing hair had turned to frost, he retained the look of a feisty man: strong shoulders and a prominent chin, narrow eyes behind tortoise-rimmed glasses, and the grimace of a man. Bad news and raised fists to deliver it forcefully. But the voice had a range: tingling, enchanting, whispering, and haunting.

He first appeared on the political scene in 1956, winning a seat in the National Assembly as a member of the anti-tax movement he led. Pierre Pugad. From 1972, when he formed an alliance of extremist groups and founded the National Front, until 2011, when he retired, he was the recognized leader of the far right in French politics, and his vocal, sometimes violent, followers were the main opposition to his party. The prevailing conservatives in the country.

His program stemmed from a central idea: that France was in need of purification because it had deviated from its Gallic and Roman Catholic roots in what he called “the natural order, which is family, country, education, and respect for the living world.” Hence he opposed the European Union, all income taxes, immigration of “foreigners,” especially Arabs and Muslims, same-sex marriage, euthanasia, and abortion.

Mr. Le Pen championed law and order, calling for the return of the guillotine, 200,000 new cells, a strong national defense, traditional culture, and “common” sovereignty. He suggested that anyone with HIV be isolated, and claimed that France’s news media were corrupt and that “elite” politicians were “taking the salaries of Jewish organisations”.

He insisted that he was not a racist, fascist or anti-Semite, although he engaged in neo-Nazi rhetoric, attracted a following from reactionary elements and spoke frequently and crudely about racial characteristics. Some of his first colleagues in the National Front were Nazi collaborators during the war.

A French court in 1987 convicted Mr. Le Pen of Holocaust denial for saying that Nazi gas chambers were a “detail” in history. He repeated his comment a decade later, and was found guilty by a German court. In 2003, 2005, 2008 and 2011, he was convicted of inciting racial hatred against Muslims. In 2012, he was found guilty of condoning war crimes because he said in a 2005 newspaper interview that “the German occupation was not particularly inhumane.” His numerous convictions resulted in several heavy fines but no prison time.

Jean-Marie Le Pen was born on June 20, 1928 in La Trinité-sur-Mer, a coastal village in Brittany, to Jean Le Pen and Anne-Marie Hervé. His father, a fisherman, was killed when a mine exploded on his boat in 1942. His mother was a seamstress of local origin. The boy was raised Roman Catholic and attended the Jesuit school in Vannes and the Lycée in Lorient.

Mr. Le Pen earned a law degree from the University of Paris, where he was active in right-wing politics, joining street brawls against communist students and being repeatedly arrested. He claimed to have lost his left eye in an election brawl, but it was only damaged; He later lost his sight due to illness.

As a Foreign Legion paratrooper in Indochina in 1954, Mr. Le Pen fought against the Communist-dominated Viet Minh. Later, as an intelligence officer in Algeria during the War of Independence, he was accused of torturing members of the Algerian National Liberation Front. He was not prosecuted and denied the witnesses’ allegations, but lost lawsuits against publications that cited them.

Mr. 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 his seat in 1962, when the colony gained independence.

In 1960, he married Berette Lalanne. Besides Marine, they had two other daughters, Marie-Caroline and Jan, and divorced in 1987. In 1991, he married Jeanne-Marie Bachous. Complete information about the survivors was not immediately available.

His family’s Paris apartment was destroyed in a bomb explosion in 1976, but no one was home, no one was seriously injured and the crime was never solved, although there was speculation that Le Pen’s political enemies were targeted. His right-wing ideas sparked such intense opposition that more than a million people participated in street marches against him. In 1977, he unexpectedly inherited $7 million and a castle near Paris after the death of Hubert Lambert, one of his political supporters. Le Pen also had homes in Paris and his birthplace, La Trinity-sur-Mer.

He ran for president in 1974, 1988, 1995, 2002, and 2007. With the exception of his surprise performance in 2002, when he received 16.9% of the vote and was forced into a runoff that brought his total to 17.8% of the vote, the results were not great.

But his daughter, Maren, achieved her best performance on her first attempt. It reduced criticism of Jews but attacked Muslim immigrants for their alleged failure to absorb French values.

In a 2018 memoir, “Son of the nation“, the first of two potential volumes (from his birth until he became a founder of the National Front in 1972), Mr. Le Pen defended the Vichy government that collaborated with the Nazis in World War II and accused the general in wartime and afterward. President Charles de Gaulle, for “aiding On Making France Small. It was a bestseller in France.

Adam Nossiter contributed reporting.