Jean-Marie Le Pen, the co-founder of the National Front (FN), the ancestor of the RN, died this Tuesday at the age of 96, his family announced.
Jean-Marie Le Pen, figure of the French extreme right and finalist in the 2002 presidential election, died Tuesday at the age of 96 in Garches (Hauts-de-Seine), in an establishment where he had been admitted there several weeks ago.
“Jean-Marie Le Pen, surrounded by his family, was called back to God this Tuesday at 12 p.m.,” his family said in a statement sent to AFP.
The founder of the National Front, which became the National Rally, gradually withdrew from political life from 2011, when his daughter Marine Le Pen took over the presidency of the party.
Indochina and Algeria
Born on June 20, 1928, in Trinité-sur-Mer (Morbihan), Jean-Marie Le Pen was a teenager when the war broke out. His father, a fisherman, died in 1942 when a mine in his trawl exploded. A ward of the nation, he wanted to join the resistance at the age of 16 but was not accepted because of his age.
Jean-Marie Le Pen then obtained a law degree. In 1953, he completed his military service and began a career as a paratrooper in the army which led him to participate in the Indochina War and the Algerian War where he was accused of torture.
First steps in politics
In 1955, Jean-Marie Le Pen embarked on his political career which would last around sixty years. It began in the legislative elections in 1956 in a list of the Poujadist movement of Pierre Poujade, the defender of small businesses. He was elected deputy at only 27 years old. Re-elected in 1958 after distancing himself from Pierre Poujade’s movement, he was defeated in 1962.
He then became the campaign director of far-right candidate Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour for the presidential election of 1965. He then won 5.2% of the vote. It was at this time that Jean-Marie Le Pen lost his left eye, the victim of a traumatic cataract. He wore a pirate eye patch for a long time before swapping it for a glass eye in the mid-1980s.
60 years of politics
In 1972, he created the National Front with the leaders of the far-right New Order movement, at the initiative of the creation of the party, and the former Waffen-SS Pierre Bousquet.
After several electorally difficult years (it won 0.7% in the first round of the 1974 presidential election), the FN took off with the arrival of François Mitterrand. In 1982, the party exceeded 10% for the first time in cantonal elections. For the first time, the doors of television opened to him.
In 1986, he was elected deputy and the National Front obtained 35 deputies on a proportional ballot. He passed the 10% mark for the first time in the presidential election in 1988 with 14.4% of the votes and more than 4 million ballots in his favor, then in 1995 with 15% of the votes.
With his anti-immigration program, for national preference, to boost the birth rate and increasingly anti-European federalism and against globalization, he caused a surprise on April 21, 2002, by qualifying for the second round of the election. presidential election with 16.9%, behind outgoing President Jacques Chirac (19.9%) and eliminating the socialist candidate and Prime Minister of cohabitation at the time, Lionel Jospin (16.2%). He will be beaten in the second round by Jacques Chirac who obtains 82.2% of the votes.
In 2007, he finished only fourth in the presidential election and his withdrawal from the leadership of the National Front from January 2011 heralded the end of the reign of the patriarch Le Pen, replaced by his daughter, Marine. A difficult end to the reign. Appointed honorary president of the FN, he was excluded in August 2015 after a final slip-up on the gas chambers.
The man of controversies
In 1987, he sparked an unprecedented scandal by claiming that the gas chambers were “a detail of the Second World War”. He started again ten years later in Munich, alongside a former Waffen SS, then in 2009 in the middle of the European Parliament. and in 2015, which will lead to his exclusion from the National Front. He will also be convicted five times, notably for condoning war crimes and contesting crimes against humanity or provoking hatred, discrimination and racial violence.
The courts will also sanction him for having nicknamed, in 1993, the Minister of the Civil Service Michel Durafour as “Mr. Durafour-Crématoire” or, in 2005, for having declared that “the German occupation had not been particularly inhumane” . Slippages carefully thought out and staged to occupy the front pages of the media and advance the “Lepenization of minds”, according to the expression of Robert Badinter.
