Gambiaj.com – (PARIS, France) – Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the far-right National Front, died on Tuesday at the age of 96. Le Pen was often embroiled in legal battles over his racist, anti-Semitic, and homophobic remarks and was eventually expelled from the party he founded, which has since moved from the fringes to the mainstream of French political life.

Over the course of his sixty-year political career, which spanned five presidential elections, Jean-Marie Le Pen revived the French far right, which had previously been disgraced by its collaboration with the Nazi regime.

He stayed at the head of the National Front, the party he co-founded in 1972, until 2011, when he handed the reins to his daughter, Marine Le Pen.

But his racist and anti-Semitic stances made him unpalatable for a renewed far right, and the party expelled him in 2015 because he repeated comments, first made in 1987, that the Nazi gas chambers were a “detail of history.”.

From Algeria to France

Born in Brittany, in La Trinité-sur-Mer, in 1928, Le Pen came to politics relatively early in his life.

After studying law and political science in Paris, he enlisted in the army in 1954, going to Indochina.

Back in Paris, an accolade of populist Pierre Poujade, Le Pen was elected to parliament in 1956, becoming the youngest member of the National Assembly.

At the end of that year he returned to Algeria, where he served in the army from the end of 1956 to April 1957—the height of the Battle of Algiers.

Le Pen was accused of torturing Algerians, which he made little attempt to hide at the time.

“I have nothing to hide. I tortured because it had to be done,” he said in a 1962 interview in the Combat newspaper, which he later corrected, saying he used “methods of coercion,” not torture.

Decades later, he came to deny using torture at all and filed several legal suits against anyone insinuating it.

Unifying France’s far right

Le Pen headed the 1965 presidential campaign of far-right lawyer Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour, and he worked to consolidate the various far-right movements in France.

In 1972, he was appointed to head a new party called the Front national pour l’unité française, known as the Front national or National Front (FN).

Le Pen ran for president for the first time in 1974 and made his way through French politics—becoming a millionaire along the way, after inheriting a mansion in 1976.

By 2002, running on a platform of “national preference” and promising to immediately deport “all illegal immigrants,” Le Pen won more votes than Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, making it into the second round of the election.

Rise of the party, fall of the man

The surprising result brought millions of people into the street to march against racism and Le Pen as its political incarnation. He was thrashed by conservative candidate Jacques Chirac.

That marked the start of the party’s rise, even as Le Pen’s own political career began to nosedive.

Marine Le Pen took over the FN and began to try and make it palatable to a broader constituency in a process that she called dé-diabolisation, or de-demonisation.

However, her father disagreed with the approach and remained true to himself, continuing to espouse anti-Semitic and other hate speech.

In 2015, after repeating his take on the gas chambers, the party decided to dismiss its founder, expelling him from the party the following year.

Grudging acceptance

Le Pen remained bitter about how the party was being run and never forgave his daughter for changing the name to the National Rally in 2018. He left the European Parliament in 2019 and gradually withdrew from public life.

Keen to keep his legacy alive, Le Pen wrote the first volume of his memoirs in 2018: Fils de la nation (Son of the nation), which sold out even before it went on sale.

He created the Jean-Marie Le Pen Institute in August 2020 to house the archives of the far right.

Family first

The Le Pens agreed to stop debating each other in public in the spring of 2023, after Jean-Marie suffered a heart attack.

A year later, he was put under the guardianship of his daughters, meaning they would make legal decisions for him. This put into question his ability to stand trial in the case involving parliamentary assistants working for the National Rally at the EU parliament.

His case ended up being separated from that of his daughter and other party leaders after a medical expert concluded he was not able to prepare his own defense.

Le Pen died in a hospital in Garches, near Paris, where he had been admitted several weeks ago, according to his family.

He is survived by his second wife, Jany Le Pen; three daughters—of whom Marine is the youngest—as well as eight grandchildren. One of his granddaughters, politician Marion Marechal Le Pen, left the National Rally to found her own far-right movement.

Source: RFI