Jean-Marie Le Pen, rabble-rousing leader of the French far-right, dies aged 96

Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of France’s modern political far-right, who built a career for half a century on rants of thinly veiled racism, anti-Semitism and neo-Nazi propaganda, has died. He was 96.

His death was confirmed on X by Jordan Bardella, the current president of that party, Mr. Le Pen founded. In a statement to the news agency Agence-France Presse, Mr. Le Pen’s family said he died on Tuesday at a hospital in Garches, west of Paris.

In April 2024, with Mr. Le Pen in frail health after suffering a second heart attack within a year, a French court awarded his daughters guardianship, giving them the right to make decisions in his name.

Mr. An arm-waving reactionary and a circus performer making outrageous claims, Le Pen ran unsuccessfully for the French presidency five times, and managed to resign in 2002, riding waves of discontent and xenophobia and raised specters for a new fascism. as he excoriated Jews, Arabs, Muslims, and other immigrants—anyone he deemed not “pure” French.

Mr. Le Pen’s youngest daughter, Marine Le Pen, succeeded him as leader of the National Front in 2011 and rose to prominence on a wave of populist anger against the political mainstream. She was defeated in France’s presidential election three times – in 2012, when she came third with 17.9 percent of the vote behind François Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy; in 2017, with 33.9 percent, who lost to centrist Emmanuel Macron; and in 2022, with 41.5 percent, defeated again by Mr. Macron.

But that year’s election also sent a record number of representatives from the party, renamed National Rally, to parliament – 89 in all – testimony to the success of Ms Le Pen’s efforts to normalize it and moderate its message in some respects.

By then it had become the leading opposition party, no longer an outcast widely regarded as a threat to the republic, and in 2024 the National Rally endorsed Mr. Macron’s immigration restriction law, an embarrassment for the French president.

Political analysts said voters had embraced Ms Le Pen’s right-wing messages in increasing numbers, which sought to tap into middle-class economic insecurity and resentment of immigrants, themes her father has pushed for years.

In an attempt to soften some of the toxic rhetoric of her father, whom she expelled from the party in 2015, Ms Le Pen offered to join civil unions for same-sex couples, to accept unconditional abortions and withdraw the death penalty from her platform. And she publicly rejected Mr. Le Pen’s anti-Semitism.

Mrs. Le Pen announced the party’s name change, to National Rally, in 2018, although it decided to keep its logo of a red, white and blue flame. The reshuffle was a further attempt to move away from the politics associated with her father, who remained a long-serving member of the European Parliament. Mr. Le Pen did not want any of her daughter’s reforms. In 2016, he founded and became chairman of the Jeanne Committees, named after Joan of Arc, a new far-right political party that embodied his long-standing ideologies.

He insisted that “the races are unequal,” that everyone with AIDS was “a kind of leper,” and that “Jews have conspired to rule the world.” He called America “a mixed nation,” dismissed Hitler’s gas chambers as “a detail” of history and said the wartime Nazi occupation of France was “not particularly inhumane.”

In fact, 76,000 Jews in France were deported to death camps during the Nazi occupation from 1940 to 1944, with the cooperation of France’s Vichy government. Only 2,500 survived. In 1944, a Nazi convoy rolled into the village of Oradour-sur-Glane and rounded up and massacred 642 residents in the worst atrocity of the war in France. Several thousand civilians were killed by the German army as the war drew to a close.

Millions were repelled by Mr. Le Pen’s statements. He was challenged by historians, condemned across the French political spectrum, including by mainstream conservatives, and convicted at least seven times of inciting racial hatred or distorting the historical record.

But with his daughter’s successes, many analysts have come to recognize the influence of some of Mr. Le Pen’s views, especially on immigration. He always had a strong core of followers, especially in the south of the country. His appearance reflected not only the shock waves of his speech but also a political drift to the right in France and other parts of Europe during economic downturns and periods of rising inflation, crime and unemployment as fears rose with the influx of immigrants from Africa and Middle East.

Mr. Le Pen’s most notable success in the presidential election came in 2002, when he defeated the Socialist candidate, Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, in the initial round of voting, and then came second in the general election, ousted by the incumbent, President Jacques Chirac. But he won almost 18 percent of the vote.

His followers were hardly a mass of anti-Semitic neo-fascists; many were simply workers, shopkeepers, unemployed youth and others facing a bleak future in a nation whose tight job markets, underperforming schools, housing shortages and lethargic politicians had left them frustrated and angry.

Mr. Le Pen had been a street fighter in his youth, and when the receding hair became frosty, he retained the combative appearance of a brawler: the strong shoulders and protruding chin, the narrow eyes behind tortoiseshell glasses, a grim mouth for bad news and raised fists to deliver it forcefully. But the voice had range: needle, charming, whispering, judgmental.

He first appeared on the political scene in 1956, winning a seat in the National Assembly as a member of the anti-tax movement led by Pierre Poujade. From 1972, when he forged an alliance of extremist groups and founded his National Front party, until 2011, when he retired, he was the recognized leader of the far right in French politics, and his vociferous, sometimes violent supporters were the biggest opposition to the nation’s mainstream conservatives.

His platform sprang from a central idea – that France needed purification because it had strayed from its Gallic and Roman Catholic roots in what he called “the natural order which is family, homeland, education and respect for the living world .” He thus opposed the EU, all income taxes, immigration of “foreigners”, especially Arabs and Muslims, and same-sex marriage, euthanasia and abortion.

Mr. Le Pen campaigned for law and order, calling for the restoration of the guillotine and 200,000 new prison cells, a strong national defense, traditional culture and the prosperity of “ordinary” people. He suggested isolating anyone with HIV and claimed that France’s news media were corrupt and that “elite” politicians were “on the payroll of Jewish organizations.”

He insisted that he was not racist, fascist or anti-Semitic, although he shared the rhetoric of neo-Nazis, drew supporters from reactionary elements and spoke frequently and crudely about racial characteristics. Some of his earliest colleagues in the National Front had been collaborators with the Nazis during the war.

A French court in 1987 sentenced Mr. Le Pen for Holocaust denial for saying Nazi gas chambers were “a detail” of history. He repeated the comment a decade later and was convicted by a German court. In 2003, 2005, 2008 and 2011, he was convicted of inciting racial hatred against Muslims. In 2012, he was convicted of tolerating war crimes for saying in a 2005 newspaper interview that “the German occupation was not particularly inhumane.” His numerous convictions resulted in many large fines, but no prison time.

Jean-Marie Le Pen was born on 20 June 1928 in La Trinité-sur-Mer, a coastal town in Brittany, to Jean Le Pen and Anne-Marie Hervé. His father, a fisherman, was killed when his boat was blown up by a mine in 1942. His mother was a seamstress of local descent. The boy was raised Roman Catholic and attended a Jesuit school in Vannes and a lycée in Lorient.

Mr Le Pen earned a law degree at the University of Paris, where he was active in right-wing politics, taking part in street fights against communist students and being repeatedly arrested. He claimed to have lost his left eye in an election campaign, but it was only damaged; later he lost his sight due to illness.

As a foreign legion paratrooper in Indochina in 1954, Mr. Le Pen against the communist-dominated Viet Minh. Later, as an intelligence officer in Algeria during its war of independence, he was accused of torturing members of the Algerian Front de Liberation Nationale. He was not prosecuted and denied the witnesses’ claims, but lost court cases against publications that quoted them.

Mr. Le Pen became one of the youngest members of the National Assembly in 1956, but after campaigning against France’s withdrawal from Algeria, he lost his seat in 1962 when the colony gained independence.

In 1960 he married Pierrette Lalanne. Besides Marine, they had two other daughters, Marie-Caroline and Yann, and divorced in 1987. In 1991, he married Jeanne-Marie Paschos. Full details of his survivors were not immediately available.

His family’s apartment in Paris was destroyed by a bomb in 1976, but no one was home, no one was seriously injured, and the crime was never solved, although there was speculation that Mr. Le Pen had been attacked by political enemies. His right-wing ideas provoked so much opposition that more than a million people took part in street rallies against him. In 1977, he unexpectedly inherited $7 million and a castle near Paris after the death of Hubert Lambert, a political supporter. Mr. Le Pen also had homes in Paris and his hometown, La Trinité-sur-Mer.

He ran for president in 1974, 1988, 1995, 2002, and 2007. Except for his surprise performance in 2002, when he received 16.9 percent of the vote and forced a runoff that raised his total to 17.8 percent of the ballots, the results were not remarkable.

But his daughter, Marine, matched his best performance in her first attempt. She had played down criticism of Jews but attacked Muslim immigrants for allegedly failing to assimilate French values.

In a 2018 memoir, “Son of the Nation,” the first of two potential volumes (from his birth to founding the National Front in 1972), Mr. The Le Pen Vichy government, which collaborated with the Nazis in World War II, accused wartime general and later President Charles de Gaulle of “helping to make France small.” It was a bestseller in France.

Adam Nossiter contributed reporting.