Jean-Marie Le Pen, Founder of France’s Post-War Far Right, Dies Aged 96

Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of France’s far-right National Front party who tapped into blue-collar anger over immigration and globalisation and revelled in minimising the Holocaust, died on Tuesday aged 96.

His death was confirmed by his daughter Marine Le Pen’s political party, National Rally (Rassemblement National).

Jean-Marie Le Pen spent his life fighting – as a soldier in France’s colonial wars, as a founder in 1972 of the National Front, for which he contested five presidential elections, or in feuds with his daughters and ex-wife, often conducted publicly.

Controversy was Le Pen’s constant companion: his multiple convictions for inciting racial hatred and condoning war crimes dogged the National Front.

His declaration that the Nazi gas chambers were “merely a detail” of World War Two history and that the Nazi occupation of France was “not especially inhumane” were for many people repulsive.

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Commenting on Le Pen’s death, President Emmanuel Macron said: “A historic figure of the far right, he played a role in the public life of our country for nearly seventy years, which is now a matter for history to judge.”

Le Pen helped reset the parameters of French politics in a career spanning 40 years that, harnessing discontent over immigration and job security, in some ways heralded Donald Trump’s rise to the White House.

He reached a presidential election run-off in 2002 but lost by a landslide to Jacques Chirac. Voters backed a mainstream conservative rather than bring the far right to power for the first time since Nazi collaborators ruled in the 1940s.

Le Pen was the scourge of the European Union, which he saw as a supranational project usurping the powers of nation states, tapping the kind of resentment felt by many Britons who later voted to leave the EU.

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“Lots of enemies, few friends and honour aplenty,” he told a website linked to the far-right. He wrote in his memoir: “No regrets.”

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