Jean-Marie Le Pen, French far-right leader, dies aged 96

Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of France’s far-right National Front party, who sent shock waves through the country when he made it to the second round of the presidential election in 2002, has died aged 96.

The former paratrooper, who led the party from 1972 to 2011, was repeatedly convicted over comments about the Holocaust, which he once dismissed as “merely a detail of history”.

His daughter Marine Le Pen took the party’s leadership in 2011 and expelled him four years later, seeking to distance the movement from his extremist reputation. The party has since been renamed the National Rally (RN).

Le Pen’s family said in a statement that he had been in a care facility for several weeks and he died at midday on Tuesday “surrounded by his loved ones”.

However, it emerged that Marine Le Pen only learned of his death from reporters while flying back from a visit to the French Indian Ocean island Mayotte, where she had been visiting victims of Cyclone Chido.

Sophie Dupont, a journalist with BFMTV who was on the plane with Marine Le Pen, said the politician was told when the flight made a technical stop in Nairobi. “Marine Le Pen’s press officer didn’t know. He went to tell her,” Dupont said.

Marine Le Pen’s entourage said she would not make any immediate comment.

The Elysée, in a statement, trod a diplomatic line, summarising Le Pen’s political career: an MP three times, a presidential candidate five times, an MEP seven times, a town councillor and regional councillor. “A historic figure of the far right, he played a role in the public life of our country for nearly 70 years, which is now a matter for history to judge,” it said.

RN said Le Pen had defended “the idea of French greatness with all his soul and at the risk of his own life”.

Last year Le Pen faced charges, along with Marine Le Pen, over allegations they and other party figures had embezzled money from the European parliament with fake jobs. Jean-Marie Le Pen was excused from attending court for health reasons.

Twenty-three years ago he had put the far right at the heart of French politics with his surprise, second-place finish in the first round of the 2002 presidential election. In the run-off he was defeated by Jacques Chirac in a landslide.

Controversies over his statements about race and the Holocaust put him at odds with his daughter’s attempts to sanitise the party and move away from its jackbooted, antisemitic image.

He was convicted and fined several times for contesting crimes against humanity, and in 2014 suggested the Ebola virus could be a solution to the global population explosion. Two years later, he was convicted of “provoking hatred and ethnic discrimination” for telling a public meeting three years earlier that Roma in the city were “rash-inducing” and smelly.

Le Pen was made lifetime honorary president of the FN when his daughter took over as party leader in 2011. She threw him out in 2015 after he refused to temper his incendiary language as she attempted to clean up the FN’s reputation, but only finally succeeded in ejecting him in 2018 after several legal battles.

Jean-Marie Le Pen was born on 20 June 1928, the only child of a Breton fisherer and his wife, a seamstress. In his autobiography, Mémoires: fils de la nation (Son of the Nation), he described his childhood as “modest” in a home with “a dirt floor”. His father died in 1942 when Jean, as he was then, was 14, after a mine caught up in his fishing net exploded.

At 16, Le Pen sought to join the military – specifically the French Interior Forces (FFI) – but was refused as he was too young. Col Henri de la Vaissière reportedly told him: “Think of your mother”. In 1946, he was expelled from his secondary school and moved to the Paris region, where he passed his baccalauréat and began studying law.

He later joined the French Foreign Legion’s parachute regiment and took part in the war in Indochina and in the Algerian war of independence, during which he was accused of torturing detainees.

In 1962, Le Pen told the newspaper Combat: “I’ve nothing to hide. We tortured because it had to be done.” Later, Le Pen denied further accusations of torture in Algeria, claiming they were part of a leftwing “government plot” to discredit him.

He had three daughters with his first wife, Pierrette, of whom Marine was the youngest. He was reported to have been closest to his granddaughter, Marion Maréchal, daughter of Yann Le Pen, his middle child. He married his second wife, Jany, in 1991.

On learning of his death, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the hard left France Unbowed. wrote on X that he believed in “respect for the dignity of the dead and the grief of their loved ones …” adding “this does not erase the right to judge their actions. Jean-Marie Le Pen’s actions remain intolerable. The battle against the man is over, that against hatred, racism, Islamophobia and antisemitism that he spread continues.”