Paris The founder of France’s far-right National Front, Jean-Marie Le Pen, passed away on Tuesday. He was well-known for his vehement anti-immigration and anti-multiculturalism speech, which won him both ardent fans and widespread censure. His age was 96.
Le Pen, a divisive figure in French politics, was repeatedly found guilty of inciting racial violence, prejudice, and antisemitism. However, the nativist beliefs that drove his decades of popularity—encapsulated in slogans like French People First—remain dominant in modern-day France, Europe, and beyond, notwithstanding those beliefs and his eventual political estrangement.
His remarks, which horrified his detractors and strained his political links, included Holocaust denial, racial criticism of Muslims and immigrants, and his 1987 plan to forcefully isolate AIDS patients in special institutions. He was just a nationalist defending the identity of everlasting France, Le Pen frequently retorted.
Le Pen eventually became estranged from his daughter, Marine Le Pen, who renamed his National Front party, expelled him, and turned it into one of France’s most potent political forces while separating herself from her father’s radical image. Le Pen made it to the second round of the 2002 presidential election.
In a message on social networking platform X, Jordan Bardella, president of the National Rally, as the party is currently named, confirmed Le Pen’s passing. In his remarkably kind remembrance, Bardella called Le Pen a tribune of the people and offered his family his condolences.
The post seemed to obfuscate the separation the relaunched party had aimed to create between its more refined, contemporary leadership under Marine Le Pen and its fiery founder.
In an unusually brief statement sent by the presidential palace, moderate French President Emmanuel Macron offered his sympathies to Le Pen’s family and friends.
According to the statement, he was a prominent member of the far right who influenced our nation’s public life for nearly 70 years, a fact that history will now have to decide.
At the time of her father’s passing, Marine Le Pen was examining the aftermath of the devastating Cyclone Chido in the French colony of Mayotte, thousands of miles away.
For his daughter, his passing occurred at a pivotal moment. If found guilty in an embezzlement trial, she might now be sentenced to prison and prohibited from seeking public office.
Jean-Marie Le Pen, a fiery political strategist and skilled orator, was a former paratrooper and Foreign Legionnaire who served in Algeria and Indochina. He exploited his charisma to enthrall audiences with his anti-immigration message.
Under the aegis of the National Front, the stout, silver-haired son of a Breton fisherman saw himself as a man on a mission to preserve French culture. Le Pen made Islam and Muslim immigration his main focus by designating Joan of Arc as the party’s patron saint and holding them responsible for France’s social and economic problems.
Le Pen’s statement at a 1990 party convention, “If I advance, follow me; if I die, avenge me; if I shirk, kill me,” reflected the theatrical approach that for decades fueled followers’ zeal.
It was impossible for politicians on the left or right to overlook Le Pen, a consistent presence in French politics who lost an eye in a street battle as a young man and wore a black eyepatch for years. He proved to be the spoiler in election after election, making opponents rush to defeat him.
A wider change in the political environment is reflected in the National Rally, the party he founded’s successor, which has not only cemented its position in French politics but also pushed Macron to the right on immigration and security.
Three years prior, Le Pen had made a radio comment referring to the Nazi death chambers as a fact of World War II history, which led to his notable conviction in 1990. He reiterated the statement in 2015, claiming he had no regrets about it. This infuriated his daughter, who was the party leader at the time, and led to a new conviction in 2016.
Additionally, he was found guilty of a 1988 remark that, in a play on words, connected a Cabinet member to the Nazi crematory ovens and a 1989 remark that blamed the Jewish international for fostering this anti-national sentiment.
Le Pen suffered yet another defeat in 2002 when he was expelled from the European Parliament for a year after attacking a Socialist lawmaker during an election campaign in 1997.
More recently, Le Pen and 26 National Front officials—including his daughters Yann and Marine Le Pen—have been charged with violating the rules of the 27-nation bloc by allegedly using funds intended for EU parliamentary aides to pay employees who performed political work for the party from 2004 to 2016. It was decided Jean-Marie Le Pen was not qualified to testify.
As Le Pen’s health deteriorated, his family requested that he be placed under formal guardianship by French court authorities in February, according to French media. His health had been deteriorating for a while.
Jean-Marie Le Pen, born on June 20, 1928, in the Brittany village of Trinite-Sur-Mer, was the ambitious son of Jean Le Pen, a fisherman who would die in World War II, and his wife Anne-Marie. He was drawn to the extreme right from an early age.
Equipped with degrees in political science and law, Le Pen traveled to Paris and, at the age of 27, joined Pierre Poujade’s Union for the Defense of Shopkeepers and Artisans as the youngest member of the National Assembly. He never deviated from the far-right course in his career.
He and Leon Gaultier, a former member of the Waffen SS, established SERP, a business that produced political discourses, in 1963. On October 5, 1972, Le Pen established the National Front alongside the neo-fascist organization New Order.
After Jean-Pierre Stirbois gained 16.7% of the vote in the September 1983 municipal election in the municipality of Dreux, west of Paris, it would take the party over ten years to become a political power.
In the European parliamentary elections held a year later, the party secured 10 deputies with an 11% victory. The message was unmistakable: Le Pen could no longer be ignored by France. Two years later, the party gained 35 seats in France’s National Assembly in legislative elections, marking its debut as a major player in the country’s politics.
By that time, Le Pen had started to refine his tough persona and had taken off the black eyepatch.
He shocked the country by receiving 14% of the vote in the 1988 presidential election’s first round. He surpassed that in his fifth presidential try fourteen years later, garnering 16.8% to finish second to Jacques Chirac and advance to the two-man runoff.
Europe shook, France shuddered, and the National Front rejoiced. A Le Pen win, however, was not going to happen. In a rare display of solidarity, opponents of him from both the left and the right flocked to the French streets. With a record 82% of the vote, Chirac was re-elected on May 5, 2002.
Le Pen’s political stance remained constant over the years.
He stated in a 2003 speech that he wanted the concept of national preference to be included into the French Constitution in order to restrict access to social assistance, housing, and employment possibilities to French nationals. “The biggest threat we face is immigration,” he remarked.
Me? Racist? Le Pen once told The Associated Press, “It’s a gag, a gag.” However, I oppose the melting pot. I support defending one’s culture. If I discovered Brooklyn culture in France, I would be devastated.
His personal life was turbulent.
In 1976, the family apartment building was damaged by an explosion, but Le Pen, his wife, and their three children were unharmed.
The French media enjoyed telling the story of Le Pen’s divorce from Pierrette Lalanne. She famously posed for Playboy in 1987, partially wearing a risqué maid’s outfit, as a reflection of that acrimonious split. According to the magazine, she was reacting to her husband’s Playboy interview, where he suggested that she may work as a maid to earn money.
In 1991, he remarried to Jany, whose real name was Jeanne-Marie Paschos.
At a party congress in 2003, Le Pen started setting the stage for his eventual successor by appointing Marine, the youngest of his three daughters, to the position of vice president. She was elected party president in 2011 and went on to compete for president herself in 2017 and 2022. Emmanuel Macron, a moderate, defeated her both times. She is seen as one of the front-runners for the 2027 presidential election.
However, she soon found herself at odds with her father due to her more moderate approach and efforts to disassociate the party from his most extremist beliefs. Her attempt to remove the National Front from its status as a pariah group ran counter to his refusal to stop his antisemitic provocations.
In 2018, she stripped him of his honorary president-for-life position and expelled him from the party he co-founded. She rebranded the National Front as National Rally a few months later as part of her plan to revitalize the party’s reputation.
Her father described it as the most severe setback the party had experienced since its inception.
Jean-Marie Le Pen resisted giving up or being quiet throughout his life.
In 2014, as the father-daughter conflict intensified, Le Pen told The AP, “I am a moral authority for the movement… and I don’t have the habit of keeping my opinions to myself.”
Le Pen was admitted to the hospital multiple times in recent years as his health declined, notably following a stroke.
Le Pen’s wife and three daughters, Marine, Yann, and Marie-Caroline, survive him.
The Associated Press
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