WorthyNews: French Far-Right Politician Jean-Marie Le Pen Dies At 96 (Worthy News In-Depth)

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By Stefan J. Bos, Chief International Correspondent Worthy News

PARIS (Worthy News) – The founder of France’s far-right National Rally party, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who had convictions for Holocaust denial and a penchant for racist and antisemitic remarks, has died, his family confirmed. He was 96.

Under his leadership, the National Rally party was kept on the sidelines of French politics till his daughter, Marine Le Pen, tried to rehabilitate the party’s public image by distancing herself from her father’s rhetoric

Jean-Marie Le Pen, a former paratrooper, led the party from 1972 to 2011 when it was called the National Front.

He had been in a care facility for several weeks and died at midday on Tuesday “surrounded by his loved ones,” his family said in a statement.

Le Pen will be remembered for running unsuccessfully for president five times.

In 2002, he shocked the political establishment by finishing second to Jacques Chirac in the first round of presidential elections.

He advanced to a runoff but received less than one-fifth of the vote as the French mainstream united behind Chirac.

TURBULENT CAREER

Throughout his turbulent political career, Le Pen espoused racist and antisemitic rhetoric that landed him in legal trouble in France, where Holocaust denial is illegal.

In 1987, he was convicted of denying the Holocaust after saying — and refusing to disavow saying — that the Nazi gas chambers were “just a detail” in history.

It was his first conviction but not his last. In 2017, he was charged with inciting hatred over saying about a Jewish singer who criticized the National Front party, “Next time we will put him in the oven.”

His daughter, Marine Le Pen, was elected the party’s leader in 2011, directly succeeding her father. She sought to moderate the image of the party, renamed National Rally, and denounced her father’s antisemitism.

Jean-Marie Le Pen was ejected from the party he founded in 2015 following the oven comments, sparking a divide among its supporters between those who favored his extremist rhetoric and those who preferred a more temperate approach.

Though he left the party, he did not leave the national stage. He continued to amass fines over his comments and ignited new controversies.

In 2018, he praised France’s World War II collaborationist government in a memoir. The Vichy government worked with the Nazis to round up Jews and send them to be murdered — the fate of more than 75,000 Jews living in France at the start of the war.

IGNITING CONTROVERSY

Under Marine Le Pen, who also ignited controversy by saying the French people should not be blamed for their part in the Holocaust, the party has continued to rise in influence.

Last year, carried by a tide of anti-immigrant sentiment across Europe, it received a third of the vote in the first round of national elections.

The younger Le Pen has focused on opposing immigration and the European Union and has herself been charged with hate speech against Muslims.

Born in the port of La Trinite-sur-Mer in the western Brittany region on June 20, 1928, Jean-Marie Le Pen was the son of a seamstress and a fisherman. His father’s fishing boat hit a mine during World War II, killing him – a loss that hit the young Le Pen hard.

Anxious to see action, Le Pen volunteered for service in two wars in French colonies: the First Indochina War (1946-1954) in Vietnam and the Algerian Civil War (1954-1962).

Shortly after his return from Algeria, he entered politics and, at 27, became France’s youngest legislator when he was elected to parliament in 1956.

But he was unable to resist the lure of the battlefield, Le Pen watchers say. Later that year, he took part in the Franco-British military expedition to seize the Suez Canal and, a few years later, joined forces fighting to keep Algeria French.

COLONIAL POSSESSIONS

As in Vietnam, he was infuriated to see France losing its colonial possessions, accusing World War II hero Charles de Gaulle of “helping make France small” by granting Algeria its independence.

A consummate orator and trained lawyer, he tapped into the anger of right-wingers nostalgic for the empire and French settlers forced to flee the North African country.

The eye patch he wore for many years added to his pugilistic air. Years later, Le Pen revealed that he lost his eye driving a tent peg into a hole, and not, as was widely thought, in a brawl.

In 1972, he co-founded the National Front, billed as a “national, social, and popular” party. Two years later, he made his first run for president.

The early years were tumultuous, with his unabashed racism and anti-Semitism striking a raw nerve in a country still haunted by the collaborationist Vichy regime during World War II.

In 1976, a bomb ripped through the Paris apartment building where Le Pen lived with his wife Pierrette and three daughters, slightly injuring six people but sparing the Le Pens.

Eight years later, Pierrette walked out of the marriage, resurfacing shortly afterward to pose nearly nude for Playboy magazine in a French maid’s outfit – her pointed answer to her husband’s advice to get a job as a cleaner.

BIG BREAKTHROUGH

His party’s first big electoral breakthrough came in the mid-1980s when the party won 35 seats in parliament.

But its fortunes fluctuated sharply over the next two decades, partly due to changes in the election system that favored big parties.

Le Pen’s message remained unchanged, however, with immigration, the political elite, and the European Union all being bashed—even though he was a member of the European Parliament for over 30 years.

In 2007, Le Pen maintained that Nicolas Sarkozy, the son of a Hungarian immigrant who went on to win the presidency, was not sufficiently French to hold the office.

He repeatedly warned that African immigration would “submerge” the country and claimed the Nazi occupation of the northern half of France in World War II was “not particularly inhumane.”

But it was comments on the Holocaust – which he repeatedly called a “detail” of history – that caused the most shock.

The remark earned the politician nicknamed the “Devil of the Republic” and one in a string of convictions for anti-Semitism and racism.

FAMILY WEDGE

It also drove a wedge between him and his daughter, Marine, who embarked on a mission to clean up the party image after taking over the party leadership in 2011.

She called the process “de-diabolisation” – “de-demonisation”—in an apparent nod to her father’s legacy.

Four years of uneasy political cohabitation between father and daughter ended in a blazing row in 2015 when the younger Le Pen kicked him out of the party for his Holocaust remarks.

The ultimate humiliation for Le Pen senior came when Marine ditched the National Front brand in early 2018. “She would have to commit suicide to cut her links with me,” he had told the Journal du Dimanche newspaper.

Further ignominy was in store for him, however. His adored granddaughter, Marion Marechal-Le Pen, a telegenic former parliamentarian tipped as a future leader of the far right, also distanced herself from the family brand.

She dropped Le Pen from her name on her social media accounts, becoming simply Marion Marechal. “Marion perhaps thinks that it is too much weight to carry,” her grandfather grumbled.

His former party, now the National Rally, has since made significant inroads in European and French politics under Marine. It showed substantial gains in last year’s European Parliament elections and became the largest single party in a subsequent general election in France, part of a broader trend in several European Union nations.

Funeral arrangements were not immediately announced Tuesday.

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