Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of France’s National Front who ran for president five times and lived to see his anti-immigrant rhetoric go mainstream, has died. He was 96.

Jordan Bardella, president of the far-right National Rally, the successor party to the National Front, confirmed his death on X.

Le Pen died in Garches, France, after having been admitted to a care facility several weeks ago, according to the news service AFP, citing a statement from his family.

Le Pen stunned the world when he made it to the runoffs of the presidential election in 2002, 30 years after establishing the National Front. By the time he passed the party leadership to his daughter, Marine Le Pen, in 2011, it was one of France’s largest political movements based on the popular vote, a position it has maintained ever since.

Jean-Marie Le Pen courted controversy throughout his career, from street brawls with leftists in his youth to comments seen as downplaying the Holocaust or insulting Arabs, for which he was convicted several times in French and European courts.

His contentious role in French politics was underlined by far-left politician Jean-Luc Melenchon. “Respect for the dignity of the dead and the grief of their loved ones does not erase the right to judge their actions,” he wrote on X. “Jean-Marie Le Pen’s actions remain unbearable. The fight against the man is over. That against the hatred, racism, Islamophobia and anti-Semitism that he spread, continues.”

The National Rally released a statement on Le Pen’s passing, saying that with his death, “a page has been turned in French political history and, given the continent-wide drive he gave to the fight for nations, in that of European political history.”

Macron’s office also issued a statement expressing condolences to Le Pen’s family and friends and noting that he “played a role in the public life of our country for almost seventy years, which will now be judged by history.”

Bomb Attack

In 1976, his Paris home was destroyed in a bomb attack. In 2000, he was suspended from the European Parliament for assaulting a French socialist politician three years earlier.

In 2015, his daughter threw him out of the party he’d founded; she’d grown tired of his extreme comments and saw him as an impediment to extending the movement’s support. By that time, many of his anti-immigrant, anti-European Union views had seeped into French right-wing discourse.

“For Le Pen and his party, the crux of the matter is simple,” historian Peter Davies wrote in The National Front (1999). “Without French babies, without a defined heritage and without a barrier excluding the non-French, the nation is nothing.”

Marine Le Pen ran for the presidency three times herself, finishing second to Emmanuel Macron in 2017 and again in 2022. The party, re-branded in 2018 as the National Rally, gained ground as new personalities such as TV pundit Eric Zemmour drew support away from France’s declining mainstream parties. In 2024 parliamentary elections, the party won more seats than any other in the National Assembly.

Minimized Holocaust

Jean-Marie Le Pen always rejected the label “far right,” insisting his movement was “neither left nor right, but French.”

He was convicted for comments in 1987 describing the murder of Jews in World War II as just a “detail” of that conflict.

“Even though I have been accused of antisemitism countless times, no one has ever heard me make anti-Semitic statements or engage in anti-Semitic behavior,” he once said.

Jean-Marie Le Pen was born on June 20, 1928, in La-Trinite-sur-Mer, a seaside town in Brittany. His father, Jean Le Pen, was a fisherman who died in 1942. His mother, Anne-Marie Herve, came from a farming family, according to Le Pen’s website.

He studied law and political science in Paris before joining the military, serving as an officer in a paratrooper battalion in Indochina and winning a medal for service in Suez. In 1956, he won a seat in parliament representing an anti-taxation protest movement, becoming the National Assembly’s youngest member.

In 1962, Le Pen lost his seat. After a period as a music producer and promoter, he founded the National Front in 1972. It slowly unified France’s disparate far-right movements, which included monarchists, Nazi collaborators seeking rehabilitation and nationalists angered by Charles de Gaulle’s dismantling of France’s overseas empire.

He made his first presidential run in 1974, polling at just 0.75%. By 1988, his share rose to 14.4% as working-class voters warmed to his warnings that immigrants were contributing to unemployment and crime.

Challenging Chirac

In 2002, his 17% of the vote was more than that of Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, propelling Le Pen into a runoff against President Jacques Chirac. The French political establishment closed ranks against Le Pen, with Chirac refusing to meet him in the traditional televised debate.

Chirac won with 82%, the largest margin ever in the Fifth Republic, indicating that the vast majority of the French population rejected Le Pen’s world view.

Le Pen’s popularity then faded, but his ideas did not. Chirac’s successor Nicolas Sarkozy, faced with a slumping economy, borrowed themes from Le Pen in his unsuccessful reelection campaign in 2012, focusing on issues such as whether halal meat should be served in school cafeterias and the perceived dangers of Muslim women wearing veils.

With his first wife, Pierrette Lalanne, Le Pen had three daughters: Marine, Yann and Marie-Caroline. He married his second wife, Jany Paschos, in 1991.

Marine, born in 1968, sought to overhaul the party’s image, dropping any hints of antisemitism and focusing on economic and social issues. Jean-Marie grumbled at his daughter’s changes to the party, and she expelled him in 2015 after he refused to call wartime collaborationist leader Philippe Petain a traitor.

Le Pen and his family dramas provided much fodder for French media. He sued his daughter in a failed attempt to be allowed back into the party, criticized her presidential campaign and insulted her niece, Marion Marechal, for deciding to quit politics after the 2017 election. Age 89 at the time, he was physically prevented from attending a party meeting.

Since then, he largely remained outside of the public eye. For a criminal trial that started in 2024 over the party’s alleged diversion of million of euros in E.U. funds to pay its staff in France, he was exempted from appearing for health reasons.

—With assistance from Samy Adghirni.

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