Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of France’s far-right National Rally party, has died aged 96.
The former paratrooper, who led the party from 1972 to 2011 when it was called the National Front, had been in a care facility for several weeks and died at midday on Tuesday “surrounded by his loved ones”, his family said in a statement.
Le Pen faced charges last year along with his daughter Marine Le Pen over allegations they and other figures in their National Rally party embezzled money from the European parliament with fake jobs. Jean-Marie Le Pen was excused from attending court for health reasons.
Le Pen repeatedly courted controversy and legal action with his views on the Holocaust, which he described as a “mere detail” in the history of the second world war, and his lauding of France’s wartime government at Vichy that collaborated with the country’s Nazi occupiers.
He has been convicted and fined several times for contesting crimes against humanity. In 2014, he suggested the deadly Ebola virus, could be a solution to the global population explosion. Two years later, he was convicted of “provoking hatred and ethnic discrimination” for telling a public meeting three years earlier that Roma in the city were “rash-inducing” and smelly.
The pugilistic Le Pen, who is believed to have lost his left eye in a fight – he later insisted it was damaged in a banal accident with a tent pole – was made lifetime honorary president of the FN when his daughter took over as party leader in 2011. She threw him out in 2015 after he refused to temper his incendiary language as she attempted to clean up the FN’s reputation but only finally succeeded in ejecting him from the party in 2018 after several legal battles.
Le Pen stood for president five times and shocked France in 2002 when he knocked the Socialist candidate Lionel Jospin out of the first round of the vote and found himself against Jacques Chirac in a second round vote for the Elysée. Chirac won by a convincing margin – more than 82% of votes.
Jean-Marie Le Pen was born the only child a Breton fisherman and his seamstress wife. His father died when Jean, as he was then, was 14, after a mine caught up in his net exploded. At 16, he asked to join the military but was refused as too young. He later joined the French Foreign Legion’s parachute regiment and took part in the war in Indochina and in the Algerian war of independence, during which he was accused of torturing detainees.
In 1962, Le Pen told the newspaper Combat: “I’ve nothing to hide. We tortured because it had to be done. When you’ve caught someone who’s just planted 20 bombs that could explode from one minute to the next and he doesn’t want to talk, you have to use exceptional methods to make him do so”. Later, Le Pen denied further accusations of torture Algeria, claiming they were part of a left-wing “government plot” to discredit him.
He was first elected as an MP in 1956 and co-founded the Front National in 1972. He remained an MP until 1988 and became an MEP in 2004 serving until 2019. He was also a regional councillor in the Provence-Alpes-Côte-d’Azur between 2010 and 2015. He had three daughters with his first wife Pierrette of whom, Marine is the youngest. He is now reported to be closest to his granddaughter, Marion Maréchal, daughter of Yann Le Pen, his middle child. He married his second wife, Jany, in 1991.
