Jean-Marie Le Pen, Rabble-Rousing Leader of French Far Right, Dies at 96

Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founding father of France’s modern political far-right who built a half-century career on rants of barely disguised racism, antisemitism and neo-Nazi propaganda, has died. He was 96.

His death was confirmed on X by Jordan Bardella, the current president of the party Mr. Le Pen founded. In a statement to the news agency Agence-France Presse, Mr. Le Pen’s family said that he died on Tuesday at a hospital in Garches, west of Paris.

In April 2024, with Mr. Le Pen in frail health after suffering a second heart attack within a year, a French court granted his daughters legal guardianship, giving them the right to make decisions in his name.

An arm-waving reactionary with the swagger of a circus pitchman making outrageous claims, Mr. Le Pen ran unsuccessfully for the French presidency five times, making it to a runoff in 2002, riding waves of discontent and xenophobia and raising specters of a new fascism as he excoriated Jews, Arabs, Muslims and other immigrants — anyone he deemed to be not “pure” French.

Mr. Le Pen’s youngest daughter, Marine Le Pen, succeeded him as leader of the National Front in 2011 and rose to prominence on a tide of populist anger at the political mainstream. She was defeated in France’s presidential elections three times — in 2012, placing third with 17.9 percent of the vote behind François Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy; in 2017, with 33.9 percent, losing to the centrist Emmanuel Macron; and in 2022, with 41.5 percent, defeated again by Mr. Macron.

But that year’s elections also sent a record number of representatives from the party, renamed National Rally, to Parliament — 89 in all — testimony to the success of Ms. Le Pen’s efforts to normalize it and moderate its message in some regards.

By then it had became the leading opposition party, no longer an outcast widely viewed as a threat to the republic, and in 2024 the National Rally backed Mr. Macron’s bill restricting immigration, an embarrassment for the French president.

Political analysts said voters in successively increasing numbers had embraced Ms. Le Pen’s right-wing messages that sought to exploit economic insecurity among the middle classes and resentment toward immigrants, themes pushed for years by her father.

Trying to soften some of the toxic rhetoric of her father, whom she expelled from the party in 2015, Ms. Le Pen offered to accede to civil unions for same-sex couples, to accept unconditional abortions and withdraw the death penalty from her platform. And she publicly rejected Mr. Le Pen’s antisemitism.

Ms. Le Pen announced the party’s name change, to the National Rally, in 2018, although it decided to keep its logo of a red, white and blue flame. The rebranding was a further effort to move away from the policies associated with her father, who remained a longtime member of the European Parliament.Mr. Le Pen would have none of his daughter’s reforms. In 2016, he founded and became president of the Jeanne Committees, named after Joan of Arc, a new far-right political party that embodied his longstanding ideologies.

He insisted that “the races are unequal,” that anyone with AIDS was “a kind of leper” and that “Jews have conspired to rule the world.” He called America “a mongrel nation,” dismissed Hitler’s gas chambers as “a detail” of history and said that the wartime Nazi occupation of France was “not especially inhumane.”

In fact, 76,000 Jews in France were deported to death camps during the Nazi occupation from 1940 to 1944, with collaboration by France’s Vichy government. Only 2,500 survived. In 1944, a Nazi convoy rolled into the village of Oradour-sur-Glane and rounded up and massacred 642 residents in the worst atrocity of the war in France. Thousands more civilians were killed by the German Army as the war neared an end.

Millions were repulsed by Mr. Le Pen’s statements. He was challenged by historians, denounced across the French political spectrum, including by mainstream conservatives, and convicted at least seven times of inciting racial hatred or distorting the historical record.

But with his daughter’s successes, many analysts have come to recognize the influence of some of Mr. Le Pen’s views, especially on immigration. He always had a strong core of followers, particularly in the country’s south. His prominence reflected not only the shock waves of his oratory but also a political drift to the right in France and other parts of Europe during economic downturns and periods of rising inflation, crime and unemployment, as fears rose with the influx of immigrants from Africa and the Middle East.

Mr. Le Pen’s most notable success in presidential races came in 2002, when he defeated the Socialist candidate, Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, in the initial round of voting, then came in second in the general election, trounced by the incumbent, President Jacques Chirac. But he won nearly 18 percent of the ballots.

His supporters were hardly a mass of antisemitic neo-fascists; many were just blue-collar workers, shopkeepers, unemployed young people and others facing bleak futures in a nation whose tight job markets, underperforming schools, housing shortages and glib politicians had left them frustrated and angry.

Mr. Le Pen had been a street fighter in his youth, and as the receding hair turned frosty he kept the pugnacious look of a brawler: the burly shoulders and jutting chin, the narrow eyes behind tortoise-rimmed spectacles, a grim mouth for the bad news and raised fists to deliver it forcefully. But the voice had range: needling, charming, whispering, condemning.

He first appeared on the political scene in 1956, winning a National Assembly seat as a member of the anti-tax movement led by Pierre Poujade. From 1972, when he forged an alliance of extremist groups and founded his National Front party, to 2011, when he retired, he was the acknowledged leader of the far right in French politics, and his vociferous, sometimes violent followers were the principal opposition to the nation’s mainstream conservatives.

His platform flowed from a central idea — that France was in need of purification because it had strayed from its Gallic and Roman Catholic roots in what he called “the natural order, which is family, homeland, teaching and respect for the living world.” He thus opposed the European Union, all income taxes, the immigration of “foreigners,” particularly Arabs and Muslims, and same-sex marriage, euthanasia and abortion.

Mr. Le Pen championed law and order, calling for the restoration of the guillotine and 200,000 new prison cells, a strong national defense, traditional culture and the ascendancy of “common” folk. He proposed isolating anyone with H.I.V. and contended that France’s news media were corrupt and that “elite” politicians were “on the payroll of Jewish organizations.”

He insisted that he was not a racist, fascist or antisemite, though he shared the rhetoric of neo-Nazis, drew followers from reactionary elements and spoke often and crudely of racial characteristics. Some of his earliest colleagues in the National Front had been collaborators with the Nazis during the war.

A French court in 1987 convicted Mr. Le Pen of Holocaust denial for saying that Nazi gas chambers were “a detail” in history. He repeated the comment a decade later, and was convicted by a German court. In 2003, 2005, 2008 and 2011, he was convicted of inciting racial hatred against Muslims. In 2012, he was convicted of condoning war crimes for saying, in a 2005 newspaper interview, that “the German occupation was not especially inhumane.” His numerous convictions resulted in many heavy fines but no jail time.

Jean-Marie Le Pen was born on June 20, 1928, in La Trinité-sur-Mer, a seaside village in Brittany, to Jean Le Pen and Anne-Marie Hervé. His father, a fisherman, was killed when his boat was blown up by a mine in 1942. His mother was a seamstress of local ancestry. The boy was raised Roman Catholic and attended a Jesuit school in Vannes and a lycée at Lorient.

Mr. Le Pen earned a law degree at the University of Paris, where he was active in right-wing politics, joined street brawls against Communist students and was repeatedly arrested. He claimed to have lost his left eye in an election brawl, but it was only damaged; he lost its vision later through illness.

As a Foreign Legion paratrooper in Indochina in 1954, Mr. Le Pen fought against the Communist-dominated Viet Minh. Later, as an intelligence officer in Algeria during its war of independence, he was accused of torturing members of the Algerian Front de Liberation Nationale. He was not prosecuted and denied the allegations of witnesses, but lost lawsuits against publications that cited them.

Mr. Le Pen became one of the youngest members of the National Assembly in 1956, but after campaigning against France’s withdrawal from Algeria, he lost the seat in 1962, when the colony achieved independence.

In 1960, he married Pierrette Lalanne. Besides Marine, they had two other daughters, Marie-Caroline and Yann, and were divorced in 1987. In 1991, he married Jeanne-Marie Paschos. Complete information on his survivors was not immediately available.

His family’s Paris apartment was destroyed by a bomb in 1976, but no one was home, no one was seriously injured and the crime was never solved, although there was speculation that Mr. Le Pen had been targeted by political enemies. His right-wing ideas stirred such heavy opposition that more than one million people took part in street rallies against him. In 1977, he unexpectedly inherited $7 million and a castle near Paris after the death of Hubert Lambert, a political supporter. Mr. Le Pen also had homes in Paris and his hometown, La Trinité-sur-Mer.

He ran for president in 1974, 1988, 1995, 2002 and 2007. Except for his surprising showing in 2002, when he received 16.9 percent of the votes and forced a runoff in a second round that raised his total to 17.8 percent of the ballots, the results were not remarkable.

But his daughter, Marine, matched his best performance on her first try. She had played down criticism of Jews but attacked Muslim immigrants for supposedly failing to assimilate French values.

In a 2018 memoir, “Son of the Nation,” the first of a prospective two volumes (from his birth to his becoming a founder of the National Front in 1972), Mr. Le Pen defended the Vichy government that collaborated with the Nazis in World War II and accused the wartime general and later president, Charles de Gaulle, of “helping make France small.” It was a best seller in France.

Adam Nossiter contributed reporting.