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 party until 2011, when he handed the reigns 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 what he had said in 1987, dismissing the Nazi gas chambers as a “detail of history”.
From Algeria to France
Born in Brittany, in La Trinité-sur-Mer, in 1928, Le Pen’s rise in politics came relatively early.
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 in 1956 to parliament, becoming the youngest member of the National Assembly.
At the end of that year he left for Algeria, where he served from the end of 1956 to April 1957 – the height of the Battle of Algiers.
He was accused of torturing Algerians, which he did not particularly try to hid at the time.
“I have nothing to hide. I tortured because it had to be done”, he said in a 1962 interview in the Combat newspaper, which he later corrected, saying he used “methods of coercion” instead of torture.
