Death of Jean-Marie Le Pen, figure of the French far right

Jean-Marie Le Pen died on January 7 in Garches (Hauts-de-Seine) at the age of 96. Here, we look back over almost seven decades of political life in the Fourth and Fifth Republics.

Jean-Marie Le Pen was born in La Trinité-sur-Mer on June 20, 1928, and became a ward of the nation after the death of his father in 1942. He holds a degree in political science and a law degree, and was president of the Corpo des étudiants en droit de Paris.

In 1953, after qualifying as a lawyer, he enlisted in the 1st Foreign Parachute Battalion and left for Indochina.

In 1956, he was elected to the French National Assembly on Pierre Poujade’s Union et Fraternité Française list, becoming deputy for Paris (1st sector of the Seine) at the age of 27. In October 1956, Jean-Marie Le Pen took a leave of absence from the National Assembly and served six months in Algeria.

In 1972, he helped found and became president of the Front National, a position he held for almost forty years. Le Pen ran in the 1974 presidential election, winning a paltry 0.74% of the vote.

In 1984, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who headed the Front National list, was elected to the European Parliament.
In the 1988 presidential election, he obtained 14.38% of the votes cast. In the 1995 presidential election, he won 15.0% of the vote, coming fourth in the first round behind Lionel Jospin, Jacques Chirac, and Édouard Balladur.

On April 21, 2002, Jean-Marie Le Pen pulled off a surprise by reaching the second round of the presidential election, only to be soundly defeated by Jacques Chirac in the run-off.

His daughter Marine Le Pen, who replaced him as head of the Front National in 2011, entered the presidential race in 2012. In 2014, Jean-Marie Le Pen began a third term as a Member of the European Parliament.

In 2015, a disciplinary procedure was launched against him at the Front National, following his controversial remarks in 1987 about the gas chambers, which he had described as “a detail of the Second World War”. Jean-Marie Le Pen was expelled from the Front National in August 2015.

Marine Le Pen explained that she would “never forgive(s) herself” for the decision to exclude her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, from the Front National (ex-RN) in an interview published on the Journal du Dimanche website a few days after her father’s death.