On the evening of 21 April 2002 the result of the first round of voting in the French presidential election was announced. It had been widely, though not universally, assumed that the outcome would see the field reduced to two contenders: the incumbent conservative president, Jacques Chirac, and the socialist prime minister, Lionel Jospin, with whom Chirac had uneasily shared power for five years.
A shudder of shock, shame, disbelief and, in many places, delight, swept the country when it became clear that Chirac would face not Jospin, but Jean-Marie Le Pen, the leader of the far-right, xenophobic and racist Front National (FN), who has died aged 96. Jospin was beaten into third place and eliminated.
It hardly mattered that hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets in the days that followed and that Chirac was eventually re-elected in a landslide, thanks largely to the ballots of appalled and penitent voters of the left. Le Pen, who had won 0.74% of the vote when he first stood for president in 1974, obtained 16.86% in the first round and 17.79% in the second.
If his overall impact were to be measured only in seats won during his years as president of the FN at local, regional, national or European elections, it could be minimised. His success, until standing down in 2011, lay in taking the far right into the mainstream of French politics and in dragging conservative discourse to the right.
At one point during the 2012 presidential contest, there seemed to be a real chance that his successor as head of the FN (since reinvented as the National Rally), his much more personable daughter Marine, might repeat her father’s exploit and reach the second round – this time at the expense of the sitting conservative president, Nicolas Sarkozy.
In the event, the victor was the socialist François Hollande, while the FN established itself as France’s third political force.
In 2017, representatives of the traditional right and left were seen off in the first round, and it took another mould-breaker, Emmanuel Macron, at the head of the newly formed centrist party En Marche!, to defeat Marine by 66% to 34%. Jean-Marie’s granddaughter Marion Maréchal-Le Pen also emerged as a prominent figure in the party.
The rebranding of the FN as the National Rally in 2018 marked an attempt to appeal to a broader range of voters. The margins between Macron and Marine were narrower still in 2022; and the National Rally’s gains continued, with the party at one point seeming to be on course to win a majority in parliament in summer 2024.
Though Jean-Marie had positioned his party to benefit from the surge in nationalism and populism felt in much of Europe and the US, he received little credit for having done so. Marine wanted to detoxify the FN of overt racism, and Jean-Marie’s third reference to the gas chambers of the Holocaust as being a detail of history led in 2015 to his expulsion from the party of which he was by then honorary president. When his daughter ran for president, it was largely as “Marine”, and in May 2018 Marion dropped the Le Pen from her surname.
Jean-Marie continued as an MEP until 2019, casting a malignant shadow over the political life of France and Europe, just as he had for decades. He seemed politically indestructible: evidence and often proof was assembled that he was a racist, liar, bully and torturer, but it seemed to have little effect on his overall popularity. He was prosecuted on several occasions, the most recent instance coming last year, in a case concerning the misuse of EU parliament funds.
Le Pen’s own electoral successes were modest – regular election to the European parliament, three spells as a member of the National Assembly, election to regional assemblies – but his name entered the political lexicon when the lepénisation des esprits, the spread of Le Pen’s ideas into people’s minds, became shorthand for the ratchet effect of the causes he espoused. He would mock his political opponents for stealing his programme, asking why people should vote for the copy when they could have the real thing.
Often portrayed as a boorish oaf, Le Pen was no fool: he was an intelligent man with a gift for demagoguery. Anyone who heard him speak, as he would do for an hour or more at a time without notes at the FN’s May Day celebration or his party’s annual fête on the edge of Paris – mixing heavy sarcasm with mockery, abuse and a vision of an all-white France – had to acknowledge the brutal power of his oratory.
His use of language was often elegant and effective, even if his excesses regularly got him into trouble with the courts. The potential flaws in his economic programme – drastic tax cuts, extra spending on French citizens but not foreigners, a return to the franc, exit from the European Union, protectionist measures – did not worry his backers.
His message was aimed at the resentful petites gens who felt neglected, ignored and discriminated against. Once, their votes had gone to the Communist party; millions switched to Le Pen, who offered them a world in which immigrants were the cause of their ills, and once they had been expelled – and abortion outlawed, the guillotine restored and the police given drastic powers – all would be well. He was successful in federating a variety of social categories: reactionary Catholics and pagan romantics, skinheads and members of the haute bourgeoisie, unemployed factory workers in the north and well-heeled wine growers in the Midi.
Born in the Breton fishing village of La Trinité-sur-Mer, he had the birth name of Jean. He reportedly changed it when he first stood for election. His parents were Jean, a fisherman who died after a mine was caught in his net when his son was 14, and Anne-Marie (nee Hervé), a seamstress.
At university in Paris, he studied politics and law, and led a rightwing student group with a reputation for violent and racist behaviour. It was widely thought that the loss of his left eye was the result of a fight, and his account of the circumstances varied over the years. More recently he said it was the result of an accident while he was erecting a marquee for a political meeting.
In 1953, he volunteered for military service in Indochina, now Vietnam, enrolling as a parachutist in the Foreign Legion and attending officer training school. Demobilised after two years, at the age of 27 he became his country’s youngest member of parliament as a backer of Pierre Poujade, whose support for small shopkeepers and businessmen, and hostility to tax prefigured elements of Le Pen’s later policies. He soon fell out with Poujade, and in 1956 again enlisted, serving in north Africa. Allegations that he was involved in the torture of Algerian prisoners dogged him for years.
Re-elected in 1958, he lost his parliamentary seat in 1962 and spent most of the 1960s engaged in far-right politics and in running a business devoted to the sale of recordings of rightwing political figures. In 1972, he founded the FN, and two years later made his first presidential bid.
Le Pen’s circumstances were transformed in 1976 when Hubert Lambert, a wealthy admirer, died and left him a fortune and a mansion in Paris. Lambert was heir to a cement fortune, but was physically frail, with psychological troubles. For years there was controversy over the manner of his death at 42. Members of his family sought to have the will annulled, and eventually the legacy was split with another claimant.
Le Pen’s new wealth did not enable him to find enough sponsors to run for president in 1981, but throughout the 1980s and 90s elections showed considerable underlying support: 14.3% in the 1988 presidential vote, 15% in 1995; almost 10% in the elections of 1986 and 1998; 15% in 1997 (though only 10% in the 2007 presidentials). Many on the conventional right, though not Chirac, were ready to flirt politically with a man who commanded such support.
The first round of the 2002 presidential election marked the high point of Le Pen’s long and turbulent career. In the legislative elections that followed, his candidates scored respectably but won no parliamentary seats. Inevitably, the question of his succession arose, but Le Pen made it clear he planned to continue: with the presidential term reduced to five years, he would be a mere 79 in 2007.
Marine was given an enhanced role, to the discontent of some of his older and more traditionally minded supporters. After the defection of his chief lieutenant, Bruno Mégret, in the late 90s, no obvious successors emerged: none of the possible contenders had a fraction of his charisma.
Marine took as a priority the task of humanising her father’s image, and began increasingly to take over as his political heir. She set about “de-demonising” the FN, and became an altogether more formidable figure, with Jean-Marie marginalised in the battle for the soul and legacy of their party.
In September 2024, father and daughter were among 25 people charged with embezzling funds for fake jobs for European parliament assistants between 2004 and 2016. Jean-Marie’s health had been poor, and he did not appear in court. The verdicts are expected shortly.
He married Pierrette Lalanne in 1960, and they had three daughters, Marie-Caroline, Yann and Marine.
After an acrimonious divorce in 1987, Pierrette denounced Le Pen, and posed for Playboy when he refused to pay alimony. In 1991 he married Jany (Jeanne-Marie) Paschos. She and his daughters survive him.