Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of France’s far-right National Front who was known for fiery rhetoric against immigration and multiculturalism that earned him both staunch supporters and widespread condemnation, died on Tuesday at age 96.
According to the family, Le Pen, who had been in a care home for several weeks, died “surrounded by his loved ones.”
Le Pen, the co-founder of the National Front, sent shockwaves through France in 2002 when he made it to the second round of the presidential election on a staunch anti-immigration platform.
He was often accused of racism and anti-Semitism and infamously dismissed the Holocaust as a detail of history.
His daughter Marine Le Pen took the party’s leadership in 2011 and booted him out four years later, seeking to distance her movement from his extremist reputation.
The party, since renamed National Rally (RN), has made significant inroads.
It showed strong gains in last year’s European Parliament elections and became the largest single party in a subsequent general election in France.
Jordan Bardella, RN party chief and the right-hand man of Marine Le Pen, said in a carefully worded tribute that Jean-Marie Le Pen had “always served France”.
“As a soldier in the French army in Indochina and Algeria, as a tribune of the people in the National Assembly and the European Parliament, he always served France and defended its identity and sovereignty,” the 29-year-old said on X.
“Today I am thinking with sadness of his family, his loved ones, and of course of Marine, whose mourning must be respected.”
Le Pen was convicted numerous times of antisemitism, discrimination and inciting racial violence. Yet, despite those convictions and his eventual political estrangement, the nativist ideas that propelled his decades of popularity —encapsulated in slogans like “French People First” — remain ascendant in today’s France, across Europe and beyond.
Throughout his life, Jean-Marie Le Pen refused to cede, or be silenced.
“I’m a moral authority for the movement … and I don’t have the habit of keeping my opinions to myself,” Le Pen told The AP in 2014 as the father-daughter feud gained momentum.
As Le Pen’s health deteriorated in recent years, he was hospitalized several times, including after he suffered a stroke.
Le Pen is survived by his wife and three daughters, Marie-Caroline, Yann and Marine.