Obituary: French far-right figurehead Jean-Marie Le Pen

Jean-Marie Le Pen, who died Tuesday aged 96, was the far-right bogeyman of French politics, infamously dismissing the Holocaust as a detail of history and spending half a century whipping up anger over immigration.

The co-founder of the far-right National Front, later renamed the National Rally (RN), was eventually booted out of the party by his daughter Marine for anti-Semitism.

A former paratrooper, Le Pen sent shock waves through France in 2002 when he made it to the second round of the presidential election, which was won by Jacques Chirac.

Le Pen, who seemed more at ease in the role of provocateur than would-be president, appeared as surprised as everyone else by his spectacular breakthrough.

Years later, he boasted that the rise of the far right around Europe showed his ideas had gone mainstream.

RN leader Jordan Bardella, his daughter Marine’s right-hand man, hailed Le Pen’s influence in a carefully-worded tribute.

“As a soldier in the French army in Indochina and Algeria, as a tribune of the people… he always served France and defended its identity and sovereignty,” the 29-year-old said on X.

Born in the port of La Trinite-sur-Mer in the western Brittany region on June 20, 1928, he was the son of a seamstress and a fisherman.

His father’s fishing boat hit a mine during World War II, killing him, a loss that hit the young Le Pen hard.

Colonial war junkie

Anxious to see action, Le Pen volunteered for service in two wars in French colonies: the First Indochina War (1946-1954) in Vietnam, and then in Algeria (1954-1962).

Shortly after his return from Algeria he entered politics and became France’s youngest MP at 27 when he was elected to parliament in 1956.

But he was unable to resist the lure of the battlefield.

Later that year, he took part in the disastrous Franco-British military expedition to seize the Suez Canal, and a few years later joined forces fighting to keep Algeria French.

As in Vietnam, he was infuriated to see France losing its colonial possessions, accusing World War II hero Charles de Gaulle of “helping make France small” by granting Algeria its independence.

A consummate orator and trained lawyer, he tapped into the anger of rightwingers nostalgic for the empire and French settlers forced to flee the North African country.

ALSO READ: French left vows ‘total break’ with Macron policies

The eye patch he wore for many years added to his pugilistic air.

Years later Le Pen revealed that he lost his eye driving a tent peg into a hole, and not, as was widely thought, in a brawl.

Apartment bombed

In 1972, he co-founded the National Front (FN), billed as a “national, social and popular” party, and two years later made his first run for president.

The early years were tumultuous, with his unabashed racism and anti-Semitism striking a raw nerve in a country still haunted by the collaborationist Vichy regime during World War II.

In 1976, a bomb ripped through the Paris apartment building where Le Pen lived with his wife Pierrette and three daughters, slightly injuring six people but sparing the Le Pens.

Eight years later, Pierrette walked out of the marriage, resurfacing shortly afterwards to pose for Playboy magazine in a French maid’s outfit, her pointed answer to her husband’s advice to get a job as a cleaner.

The FN’s first big electoral breakthrough came in the mid-1980s, when the party won 35 seats in parliament.

ALSO READ: French minister says New Caledonia capital ‘under control’

But its fortunes fluctuated sharply over the next two decades, partly a result of changes in the electoral system that favoured big parties.

Le Pen’s message remained unchanged, however, with immigration, the political elite and the European Union all taking a bashing, even though he himself was a member of the European Parliament for over 30 years.

In 2007, Le Pen maintained that Nicolas Sarkozy, the son of a Hungarian immigrant who went on to win the presidency, was not sufficiently French to hold the office.

He repeatedly warned that African immigration would “submerge” the country and claimed the Nazi occupation of the northern half of France in World War II was “not particularly inhumane”.

But it was comments on the Holocaust, which he repeatedly called a “detail” of history, that caused the most shock.

The remark earned him the nickname the “Devil of the Republic” and one of a string of convictions for anti-Semitism and racism.

It also drove a wedge between him and his daughter Marine, who embarked on a mission to clean up the FN’s image after taking over the party leadership in 2011.

She called the process “de-demonisation” in an apparent nod to the legacy left by her father.

ALSO READ: Tension as French election campaign comes to an end

What’s in a name?

Four years of uneasy political cohabitation between father and daughter ended in a blazing row in 2015, when the younger Le Pen kicked him out of the party for his Holocaust remarks.

The ultimate humiliation for Le Pen senior came when Marine ditched the National Front brand in early 2018.

“She would have to commit suicide to cut her links with me,” he had told the Journal du Dimanche newspaper.

ALSO READ: Jean-Marie Le Pen’s pull-no-punches memoirs a runaway hit

Further ignominy was in store for him, however.

His adored granddaughter, Marion Marechal-Le Pen, a telegenic former MP tipped as a future leader of the far right, also distanced herself from the family brand.

She dropped Le Pen from her name on her social media accounts, becoming simply Marion Marechal.

“Marion perhaps thinks that it is too much weight to carry,” her grandfather grumbled.

However, his rebranded former party has since made major inroads under his daughter.

It showed strong gains in this year’s European Parliament elections, and became the largest single party in a subsequent general election in France.

© Agence France-Presse