Far-right National Front founder Jean-Marie Le Pen dies aged 96
Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the far-right National Front, died on Tuesday at the age of 96. Le Pen was often embroiled in legal battles over his racist, anti-Semitic, and homophobic remarks, and was eventually expelled from the party he founded, which has since moved from the fringes to the mainstream of French political life.
Over the course of his sixty-year political career, which spanned five presidential elections, Jean-Marie Le Pen revived the French far right, which had previously been disgraced by its collaboration with the Nazi regime.
He stayed at the head of the National Front, the party he co-founded in 1972, until 2011, when he handed the reins to his daughter, Marine Le Pen.
But his racist and anti-Semitic stances made him unpalatable for a renewed far right, and the party expelled him in 2015 because he repeated comments, first made in 1987, that the Nazi gas chambers were a “detail of history”.
From Algeria to France
Born in Brittany, in La Trinité-sur-Mer, in 1928, Le Pen came to politics relatively early in his life.
After studying law and political science in Paris, he enlisted in the army in 1954, going to Indochina.
Back in Paris, an accolade of populist Pierre Poujade, Le Pen was elected to parliament in 1956, becoming the youngest member of the National Assembly.
At the end of that year he returned to Algeria, where he served in the army from the end of 1956 to April 1957 – the height of the Battle of Algiers.
Le Pen was accused of torturing Algerians, which he made little attempt to hide at the time.
Read more on RFI English
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