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

Jean-Marie Le Pen founded the French far-right in the 1970s and posed a strong challenge to the presidency. But it wasn’t until he handed the reins to his daughter that his renowned party saw power.

He died at the age of 96, according to his family.

Le Pen’s supporters saw him as a charismatic defender of all, who was not afraid to speak out on difficult issues.

And for several decades he was seen as France’s most controversial political figure.

His critics denounced him as a far-right fanatic and the courts convicted him several times for his radical comments.

A Holocaust denier and unrepentant extremist on issues of race, gender and immigration, he 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 soundly defeated. This demon had to be removed from the National Front if it wanted to continue moving forward, a process that became known as “demonization.”

For his part, the five-time presidential candidate, who began his political life fighting communists and conservatives alike, described himself as “neither droite, nor gauche, français,” neither right nor left, but French.

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

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

“But think how much better it would be for him if he hadn’t excluded me from 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 age 14 when his fishing boat hit a German mine. Le Pen became Nation Quarter – the term French authorities use for those whose parents were injured or killed in war – which entitles them to state funding and support.

Two years later he attempted to join the French Resistance, but was rejected. He wrote in an autobiography that his first “war decoration” was a “masterly slap” 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 posted to Indochina (modern-day Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, then controlled by France) and two years later to Egypt, when France, the United Kingdom and Israel invaded the country in an attempt to take control of the Suez Canal. . Both conflicts ended in French defeat.

But it was his stay in Algeria that would define much of his politics and career.

He was stationed there as an intelligence officer, when the Algerians were fighting a brutal but ultimately successful war of independence against Paris.

Le Pen saw the loss of Algeria as one of the great betrayals in French history, fueling her 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, something he always denied.

Decades later he would unsuccessfully sue two French newspapers, Le Canard enchaîné and Libération, for reporting on the accusations.

Le Pen was first elected to the French parliament in 1956 in a party led by militant right-wing merchant leader Pierre Poujade. But they fell out and Le Pen briefly returned to the army in Algeria. In 1962 he had lost his seat in the National Assembly and would spend the next decade in the political desert.

During a stint in 1965 as campaign manager for far-right presidential candidate Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour, Le Pen defended the wartime government of Marshal Pétain, who supported the Nazi German occupation forces.

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

It was during that election campaign when he lost sight in his left eye. For several years he wore an eye patch, leading to stories of a political fight. I had actually lost it while setting up a tent.

“While holding the mallet… a shock to the eye, I have to be hospitalized. Retinal detachment,” I would write in a memoir years later.

It was not until 1972 that Le Pen’s political rise really began. That year he created the National Front (FN), far-right party created to unify the nationalist movement in France.

At first, the party had little support. Le Pen ran for president in 1974 for the FN, but received less than 1% of the vote. In 1981 he didn’t even get enough signatures on his nomination form to run.

But the party gradually attracted voters with its increasingly strident anti-immigration policies.

The south of France in particular, where large numbers of North African immigrants had settled, began to support the FN. In the 1984 European elections he obtained 10% of the votes.

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

As an MEP, he expressed his hatred towards the European Union and what he considered its interference in French affairs. He would later call the euro “the occupation currency.”

But his growing political fortune did not prevent him from expressing shocking opinions.

In a famous interview in 1987, he downplayed the Holocaust: the murder of six million Jews by Nazi Germany. “I’m not saying the gas chambers didn’t exist. I never saw them personally,” he told an interviewer. “I’ve never particularly studied the subject, but I think they are a point of detail in the history of World War II.”

Your comments about the detail would haunt the rest of his career.

Regardless of the controversy, his popularity grew. In the 1988 presidential elections he obtained 14% of the votes. That figure increased to 15% in 1995.

Then came 2002. With many candidates from the main parties dividing opposition support, Jean-Marie Le Pen entered the second and final round of the presidential election.

The result shocked French society. More than a million protesters took to the streets to oppose Le Pen’s ideas.

The far-right politician inspired such disgust among the majority that parties across the political spectrum called on their followers to back President Jacques Chirac for a second term. Chirac won 82% of the vote, the largest victory in French political history.

Le Pen would run for president again in 2007, but by then her political star had faded. Le Pen, then the oldest candidate to contest the presidency, came in fourth place.

Within months of that vote, newly elected President Nicolas Sarkozy – whom Le Pen had attacked as a “foreigner”, due to his Greek, Jewish and Hungarian ancestors – seized on the FN’s main campaign themes, national security and immigration, in the legislative elections, and openly declared that he intended to pursue the votes of the FN.

He swept the rug under the FN. Le Pen’s party failed to win a single seat in the National Assembly and, beset by financial problems, announced plans to sell her party headquarters outside Paris.

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

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

Then the relationship was irreparably shattered.

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

Two years later, during his own presidential campaign, Marine changed the party’s name to National Meetingor National Rally.

His father condemned the move as suicidal.

But Jean-Marie Le Pen did not regret it.

“The detail was in 1987. Then it came back in 2015. That doesn’t exactly happen every day!” he told the BBC in an interview in 2017..

He was even optimistic about the disagreements with his family, at least publicly.

“It’s life! Life is not a calm, flowing stream,” he said.

“I’m used to adversity. For 60 years I’ve rowed against the current. We’ve never had the wind at our backs! No, in fact, one thing we never got used to was the easy life!”