He died at the age of 96 Jean-Marie Le Pen historical leader of French far right founder of the Front National. The family reported it. Marine’s father, who inherited his passion and political faith, died in a facility where he had been hospitalized for weeks. “Surrounded by his loved ones, Jean-Marie Le Pen was called back to God today at 12pm,” read a statement from his family.
Born in 1928 in La Trinité-sur-Mer (Morbihan), in Brittany, the son of a fisherman and a seamstress, “he was not predestined”, underlined Le Figaro in remembering Le Pen. Following the loss of his father in the explosion of a German mine off the coast of Brittany, at just 14 years old Jean became a ‘protege’ of the nation: “This had a profound effect on me”, he later said in his memoirs released in 2018, “I was twice a child of France, so I had to pay even more attention to my country.”
For Le Figaro, Le Pen was “the most controversial political figure” in the country, a “devil of the Republic”. Accused by his detractors of racism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, condemned several times, he never accepted the ‘normalising’ turn of the Front National which his daughter Marine led and which in 2015 led to the exclusion of Jean Marie from the party he had founded. And with which, Le Monde recalls, “he had brought the far right back to the heart of French politics”.
What has most marked its political history is undoubtedly the political earthquake of 21 April 2002 when, overcoming the incumbent prime minister, the socialist Lionel Jospin, in the first round of the presidential elections, he reached the run-off with Jacques Chirac.