Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of French far right

Jean-Marie Le Pen founded a far-right French party in the 1970s and became a major challenge for the presidency. But it was when he handed the leadership over to his daughter that his re-formed team saw strength.

He died at the age of 96, his family said.

Le Pen’s supporters saw her as a charismatic everyman hero, unafraid to speak out on difficult topics.

And for decades he was seen as the most controversial politician in France.

His critics accused him of being a right-wing extremist and the courts convicted him several times for his harsh words.

An anti-Nazi and radical activist on race, gender and immigration, she gave up her political career to impose herself and her ideas on French politics.

The so-called Devil of the Republic was a candidate for the French presidential election in 2002, but was surprisingly defeated. That demon had to be removed from the National Front if it was to progress – a process that became known as “de-demonisation”.

For him, the five-year president – who began his political life fighting against Communism and moderates – called himself “ni droite, ni gauche, français” – not right, not left, but French.

And all the French had their own opinion about Le Pen. In 2015, Marine Le Pen expelled her father from the National Front that she founded four decades ago.

“Perhaps by removing me they wanted to do something to be established,” he later told the BBC’s Hugh Schofield.

“But think how much better it would have been if he hadn’t kicked me out of the party!”

Jean-Marie Le Pen was born in the small Breton village of La Trinité-sur-Mer on June 20, 1928.

His father died when he was 14 when his fishing boat hit a German mine. Le Pen became a Ward of the Nation – a term French officials use for those whose parents were injured or killed in the war – giving him access to money and government support.

Two years later he tried to join the French Resistance, but was rejected. He wrote in his autobiography that his first “battle decoration” was a “magisterial slap” from his mother, when he came home and told her what he wanted to do.

In 1954, Le Pen joined the French Foreign Legion. He was sent to Indochina – today’s Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, then controlled by France – and then two years later to Egypt, when France, the UK and Israel conquered the country in order to control the Suez Canal. All these conflicts ended in the defeat of France.

But it was his time in Algeria that will tell a lot about his politics, and his work.

He was posted there as a police officer, while the Algerians were fighting a brutal but successful war of independence against Paris.

Le Pen saw the loss of Algeria as one of the biggest betrayals in French history, which led to her disdain for World War II hero and President Charles de Gaulle, who ended the colonial war.

During the war of independence, he is said to have participated in the torture of Algerian prisoners, which he has always denied.

Decades later he unsuccessfully sued two French newspapers, Le Canard enchaîné and Libération, for reporting on these crimes.

Le Pen was first elected to the French parliament in 1956 in a party led by right-wing business leader Pierre Poujade. But he fell and Le Pen briefly returned to the war in Algeria. By 1962 he had lost his seat in the National Parliament and was destined to spend the next decade in the political wilderness.

In 1965 as campaign manager for right-wing presidential candidate Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour, Le Pen defended the wartime government of Marshal Pétain, who supported the Nazis in Germany.

“Was General de Gaulle more courageous than Marshal Pétain in the occupied zone? This is not true. It was easier to resist in London than to resist in France,” he said.

It was during the election campaign that he lost sight in his left eye. For several years he wore an eye patch – giving news about political boxing. In fact, he lost it while he was building the tent.

“I’m holding a mallet … I’m shaking in my eyes, I need to be hospitalized. would write in a memoir years later.

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

At first, the party had little support. Le Pen ran for president in 1974 for the FN, but won less than 1% of the vote. In 1981 he failed to even get enough signatures on his nomination form to stand.

But the party slowly won over voters with its anti-immigration policies.

The south of France in particular – where many people from North Africa had come to settle – began to move behind the FN. In the European elections of 1984, it got 10% of the votes.

Le Pen herself won a seat in the European Parliament, which she held for more than 30 years.

As an MEP he expressed his distaste for the European Union and what he saw as its interference in French affairs. They will later call the euro “the currency of work”.

But his rising political fortune did not stop him from expressing his extraordinary views.

In a famous interview in 1987, he denounced the Holocaust – the killing of six million Jews in Germany. “I’m not saying that gas chambers don’t exist. I’ve never seen them myself,” he told the interviewer. “I haven’t studied this story in particular, but I believe it is the most detailed information in the history of World War II.”

His comments about in detail he can do all his work.

Despite the controversy, his popularity grew. In the 1988 election, he took 14% of the vote. This figure rose to 15% in 1995.

Then the year 2002 came. With many people who wanted to compete, Jean-Marie Le Pen entered the second and final round of the presidential election.

The results shocked the French people. More than 1 million people protested in the streets against Le Pen’s views.

The far-right politician has fueled so much public frustration that political parties have asked their supporters to support President Jacques Chirac for a second term. Chirac took 82% of the vote, the largest victory in French political history.

Le Pen would run for the presidency again, in 2007, but by then her political star had waned. Le Pen, who at the time was the biggest candidate for the presidency, came fourth.

In the months since the vote, newly elected President Nicolas Sarkozy – whom Le Pen attacked as a “foreigner”, because of his Greek, Jewish and Hungarian ancestry – took the main themes of the FN campaign on national security and immigration to the polls. of law, and publicly stated that they want to follow the FN votes.

It swept the rug out from under FN. Le Pen’s party was unable to win a single seat in the National Assembly and, facing financial problems, she announced that she wanted to sell her party’s headquarters outside of Paris.

In 2011, he stepped down as party leader and was succeeded by his daughter, Marine.

Father and daughter fell at the same time. Marine Le Pen enthusiastically moved the party away from her father’s extremist policies, to make it more attractive to more Eurosceptic voters.

Then the relationship turned sour.

In 2015, Jean-Marie Le Pen repeated more, his denial of the Holocaust, in a radio interview. After months of heated debate, members of the FN party voted to remove their founder.

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

His father criticized this and said that he wanted to kill himself.

But Jean-Marie Le Pen remained unrepentant.

“The result was in 1987. Then it went back to 2015. That’s not exactly every day!” he told the BBC in an interview in 2017.

He also confirmed that he has a problem with his family – especially in public.

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

“I’m used to challenges. For 60 years I’ve been rowing against the tide. Not once has the wind looked at us! No, the one thing we’re not used to is the easy life!”