From the torture of Algerians to Unifying France's far right

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 reigns to his daughter, Marine Le Pen.

But his racist stances made him unpalatable for a renewed far right, and the party expelled him in 2015 because he repeated what he had said in 1987, dismissing the Nazi gas chambers as 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 in 1956 to parliament, becoming the youngest member of the National Assembly.

At the end of that year, he went back 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 did not particularly try to hid 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” instead of 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

In 1972, he was appointed to head a new party that was 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 that Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, and made it into the second round of the election.

The result was surprising and brought millions of people into the street to march against racism and Le Pen as its political incarnation, and Chirac was easily re-elected.

That was the start of a rise for the party, even as Le Pen’s own political career went down from there.

Marine Le Pen took over the FN and began to try to normalise it – 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 hate speech. In 2015, after repeating his take on the gas chambers, the party decided to dismiss its founder, and expelled him from the party the next year.

Grudging acceptance

While he remained bitter about how the party was being run – he never forgave Marine for changing the name to the National Rally in 2018 – Le Pen gradually withdrew from public life, after leaving the European Parliament in 2019.

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

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, which meant they would make legal decisions for him, which 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 wife, Jany Le Pen, three daughters, Marie-Caroline, Yann and Marine, who is the youngest, as well as eight grandchildren, including Marion Marechal Le Pen, a politician who left the National Rally to found her own far right movement.