Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the far-right National Front party that embraced working-class concerns about immigration and globalization and built a career on widely viewed rhetoric, has died Racist and xenophobic, at the age of 96.
His death was confirmed by his daughter Marine Le Pen's political party, National Rally.
Jean-Marie Le Pen spent his life fighting, whether as a soldier in the French colonial wars, as the founder of the National Front (for which he contested five presidential elections) or in conflict with his daughters and his wife, who were often led. in public.
Controversy was Le Pen's constant companion. Accusations of racism, anti-semitism and homophobia dogged the National Front after it co-founded the party in 1972.
In the early years of the AIDS crisis, Le Pen suggested that patients should be isolated in separate facilities.
He was tried, convicted and fined in 1996 for opposing war crimes after declaring that the Nazi gas chambers were “just a detail” of World War II history and not property were the Nazis in France “particularly inhumane”.
These comments sparked outrage in France, where the police had rounded up thousands of Jews who were sent to the Auschwitz death camp.
“I stand by this, because I believe it is the truth,” Le Pen said in 2015 when asked if he regretted the idea of the gas chamber, which ' angering his daughter Marine in the process.
In recent years, Le Pen has made Islam and Muslim immigrants his main target, blaming them for France's economic and social woes. He once told the Associated Press that it would be “difficult if I found the culture of Brooklyn in France.”
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Marine Le Pen learned of her father's death while living in Kenya when she returned from the French overseas territory of Mayotte which was hit by a cyclone.
Jordan Bardella, chairman of the National Rally, praised him for “always serving France, defending its identity and sovereignty”.
Commenting on Le Pen's death, President Emmanuel Macron said: “A historic figure of the extreme right, he played a role in the public life of our country for almost 70 years, which is now a matter of history to judge .
A populist and fiery orator, Le Pen helped rewrite the boundaries of French politics in a career spanning 40 years, riding waves of voter discontent and harnessing discontent about in- migration and job security.
He made it to the presidential race in 2002 but lost in a landslide to Jacques Chirac, as voters chose to back a mainstream conservative rather than the far right back to power for the first time since Nazi collaborators ruled in the 1940s.
Le Pen was the scourge of the European Union, which he saw as a transnational project using the powers of nation states, tapping into the kind of resentment that many Britons who later voted to leave the EU had. .
Born in Brittany in 1928, Le Pen studied law in Paris in the early 1950s and went on to become part of the Foreign Legion as a paratrooper fighting in Indochina in 1953.
Le Pen campaigned in the late 1950s to keep Algeria French, as an elected member of the French parliament and as a soldier on French territory at the time. He publicly justified the use of torture but denied using such practices himself.
In his memoirs, he said he lost an eye in 1965 when, while campaigning for a right-wing presidential candidate, the centerpiece of a marquee tent was knocked down and thrown against him before a rally. By that time, he had established a company with Léon Gaultier, who had once been a soldier in the Waffen-SS for Nazi Germany, which planted the seeds for the creation of the National Front.
After years on the fringes of French politics, Le Pen's fortunes changed in 1977 when he was bequeathed a mansion outside Paris by a millionaire benefactor, along with 30 million francs, which is about five million euros ($7.4 million Cdn) in today's money.
That allowed Le Pen to advance his political ambitions and agenda despite being shunned by traditional parties.
His first wife, Pierrette Lalanne, went out with his biographer in the 1980s, posing half-naked in Playboy to take revenge on a man she said was violent. She left Le Pen with one of his spare glass eyes and returned him when he agreed to return her cremated mother's ashes.
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Le Pen continued to tap white, working-class anger over immigration and resentment against the Paris-based business and political elites and the National Front surged in local, regional and then European elections.
Traditional parties tried to win back voters with tougher talk on immigration. This tactic helped conservative Nicolas Sarkozy win the presidency in 2007, and being tough on crime and immigration is now more mainstream.
In 2011, after maintaining a tight personal grip on the National Front, Le Pen was succeeded as party leader by her daughter Marine, who campaigned to shed the party's enduring image as antisemitic and rebrand as the defender of the working class.
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Le Pen is survived by his wife Jeanne-Marie Paschos and three daughters: Marie-Caroline, Yann and Marine.
Marine Le Pen has reached two presidential election runs, losing to Macron both times. While she is a dubious candidate for the next presidential election, due in 2027, she also faces a possible prison term and a ban from running for political office in the embezzlement case.
Yann Le Pen is also involved in that case, accused of using money meant for EU parliament supporters to pay employees who did political work for the party between 2004 and 2016. violates the rules of the 27-nation bloc. Jean-Marie Le Pen was deemed ineligible to testify.
