Jean-Marie Le Pen - founder of French far right and 'Devil of the Republic' - Voice of Asia

Jean-Marie Le Pen founded the French far-right in the 1970s and mounted strong challenges for the presidency. But it was only when he handed power to his daughter that his rebranded party saw a chance of power. His family said he had died, aged 96.

Le Pen's supporters considered him a charismatic man-of-the-people, who dared to speak his mind on difficult subjects. For decades, he was regarded as France's most controversial politician. His critics denounced him as a far-right bigot, and he was repeatedly convicted in courts for his radical pronouncements.

A Holocaust denier and unrepentant extremist on issues of race, gender and immigration, he devoted his political career to trying to push himself and his views into the French political mainstream. This so-called “devil of the Republic” came second in the 2002 French presidential elections, only to be soundly defeated. Further progress required removing this devil from the National Front, a process known as "de-demonization".

The five-time presidential candidate - whose political career began with fights against Communists and conservatives - described himself as “ni droite, ni gauche, français”, or “neither right, nor left, but French”. All French people had an opinion about Le Pen. In 2015, Marine Le Pen expelled her father from the National Front he had founded four decades earlier. “Perhaps by getting rid of me, she wanted to make some sort of gesture to the establishment,” he later told the BBC’s Hugh Schofield. “But think how much better she would have done if she hadn’t excluded me from the party!”

Jean-Marie Le Pen was born on 20 June 1928 in La Trinité-sur-Mer, a small village in Brittany. He lost his father at the age of 14, when his fishing boat struck a German mine. Le Pen became a “pupil of the nation,” a term the French authorities used to describe those whose parents had been injured or killed in the war, entitling him to state funding and support. Two years later, he tried to join the French Resistance, but was turned away. His first “war medal,” he wrote in his autobiography, was a “hard slap” from his mother when he came home to tell her what he had tried to do.

In 1954, Le Pen joined the French Foreign Legion. He was sent to Indochina - modern-day Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, then under French control - and then two years later to Egypt, when France, Britain and Israel invaded the country to try to take control of the Suez Canal. Both conflicts ended in French defeat. But it was his experience in Algeria that would define much of his political career.

He was sent there as an intelligence officer at a time when Algerians were fighting a brutal but ultimately successful war of independence against Paris. Le Pen saw the loss of Algeria as one of the greatest betrayals in French history, which fueled his hatred of the Second World War hero and then-president Charles de Gaulle, who ended the war in the colony. During the war of independence, he was alleged to have taken part in the torture of Algerian prisoners, an allegation he always denied. Decades later, he sued two French newspapers, Le Canard Enchaîné and Libération, for reporting the allegations, but ultimately lost.

Le Pen was first elected to the French parliament in 1956, when his party was led by Pierre Poujade, a militant right-wing shopkeepers' leader. But they fell out, and Le Pen briefly returned to the army in Algeria. By 1962, he had lost his seat in the National Assembly and spent the next decade in the political wilderness. While campaign manager for far-right presidential candidate Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour in 1965, Le Pen defended Marshal Pétain, the head of the wartime government that collaborated with occupying Nazi German forces. “Was General de Gaulle braver than Marshal Pétain in the occupied zone? That is not certain. It is much easier to resist in London than in France,” he said.

It was during that campaign that he lost the sight in his left eye. For years, he wore an eye patch, prompting stories of political brawls. In fact, he lost it while putting up a tent. “While wielding a mallet… my eye was struck, and I had to be hospitalized. Detachment of the retina,” he wrote in his memoirs years later. It was not until 1972 that Le Pen's political rise truly began. That year, he founded the National Front (FN), a far-right party aimed at unifying the French nationalist movement.

At first, the party attracted little support. Le Pen ran for president on behalf of the National Front in 1974, but won less than 1% of the vote. In 1981, he did not even get enough signatures on his nomination papers to stand. But the party gradually attracted voters with its increasingly hard-line anti-immigration policies. This was especially true in the south of France - where large numbers of North African immigrants had settled - which began to support the National Front. In the 1984 European elections, the party won 10% of the vote.

Le Pen himself won a seat in the European Parliament, which he would hold for more than 30 years. As a member of the European Parliament, he voiced his hatred of the EU and what he saw as its interference in French affairs. He later called the euro a “currency of occupation”. But his rising political fortunes did not stop him from expressing shocking views. In a notorious 1987 interview, he downplayed the Holocaust - Nazi Germany's murder of six million Jews. “I’m not saying the gas chambers didn’t exist. I haven’t personally seen them,” he told an interviewer. “I haven’t particularly studied the question, but I think they are a detail of the history of the Second World War.” His comment about a "detail" would follow him for the rest of his career.

Despite the controversy, his popularity grew. In the 1988 presidential election, he won 14% of the vote. That figure rose to 15% in 1995. Then came 2002. With many mainstream candidates splitting the opposition vote, Jean-Marie Le Pen squeezed into the second and final round of the presidential election. The result shocked French society. More than a million protesters took to the streets to oppose Le Pen’s views. The far-right politician had aroused so much antipathy that parties across the political spectrum called on their supporters to back the incumbent president, Jacques Chirac, for re-election. Chirac won with 82% of the vote, the biggest landslide in French political history.

Le Pen would run for president again in 2007, but by then his political star had faded. The oldest candidate to run for president at the time, Le Pen finished fourth. In the months after the vote, the newly-elected president, Nicolas Sarkozy - who Le Pen had attacked as a “foreigner” because of his Greek, Jewish and Hungarian heritage - seized the National Front’s main campaign themes of national security and immigration in the legislative elections, openly saying he intended to win over National Front voters. This thoroughly undermined the National Front. Le Pen’s party failed to win a single seat in the National Assembly and, beset by financial problems, he announced plans to sell its party headquarters outside Paris.

In 2011, he stepped down as party leader, to be replaced by his daughter, Marine. Father and daughter almost immediately fell out. Marine Le Pen consciously moved the party away from her father's more extreme policies, to make it more appealing to mainstream, Eurosceptic voters. Then, the relationship broke down completely. In 2015, Jean-Marie Le Pen repeated his “detail” Holocaust denial in a radio interview. After months of bitter legal wrangling, National Front members eventually voted to expel their own founder. Two years later, during Marine’s own presidential campaign, she changed the party’s name to the National Rally. Her father denounced the move as suicidal.

But Jean-Marie Le Pen remained unrepentant. “The detail was in 1987. Then it came back in 2015. It’s not something that happens every day!” he said in a 2017 interview with the BBC. He even struck an upbeat note about the rift with his family – at least in public. “That’s life! Life is not a smooth, calm river,” he said. “I’m used to adversity. For 60 years, I’ve been going against the current. We’ve never had a tailwind! No, indeed, we’ve never got used to an easy life!”