Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of the French right

Jean-Marie Le Pen founded a far-right French party in the 1970s and mounted a strong challenge for the presidency. But it wasn't until he handed over the reins to his daughter that his rebranded team saw potential.

He died at the age of 96, his family said.

Le Pen's fans saw him as a loving champion of all men, unafraid to talk about difficult topics.

And for several decades he was seen as the most controversial figure in French politics.

His critics denounced him as a bully and the courts convicted him many times because of his strong words.

A Holocaust denier and an unrepentant extremist on race, gender and immigration, he gave up his political career to promote himself and his ideas in French politics.

The so-called Devil of the Republic came second in the 2002 French presidential election, but lost in spectacular fashion. That demon had to be removed from the National Front if it was to continue – a process known as “de-demonisation”.

On the other hand, the five-time presidential candidate – who began his political life fighting Communists and Conservatives alike – described himself as “ni droite, ni gauche, français” – not right, not left, but French.

And all the French had their opinions about Le Pen. In 2015, Marine Le Pen expelled her father from the National Front she had founded four decades earlier.

“Perhaps by firing me he wanted to make some kind of show of establishment,” he would later tell the BBC's Hugh Schofield.

“But think how much better he would have done if he hadn't kicked me out of the party!”

Jean-Marie Le Pen was born in the small Breton village of La Trinité-sur-Mer on 20 June 1928.

He lost his father when he was 14 when his fishing boat hit a German mine. This Pen was a Student of the Nation – the term used by the French authorities for those who had a parent injured or killed in the war – which gives them the right to receive financial support and support.

Two years later he tried to join the French Resistance, but was rejected. He wrote in his autobiography that his “first war decoration” was a “judicial slap” from his mother, when he came home and told her what he had tried to do.

In 1954, Le Pen joined the French Foreign Legion. He was sent to Indochina – modern Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, then controlled by France – and then two years later to Egypt, when France, the UK and Israel invaded the country in an attempt to control the Suez Canal. Both conflicts ended in French defeat.

But it was his time in Algeria that would define much of his politics, and his work.

He was stationed there as an intelligence officer, while the Algerians fought a brutal but successful war of independence against Paris.

Le Pen saw the loss of Algeria as one of the biggest shocks in French history, fueling her disdain for World War II hero and then-President Charles de Gaulle, who ended the colonial war.

In that war of independence he is said to have participated in the torture of Algerian prisoners, something he has always denied.

Decades later he would unsuccessfully sue two French newspapers, Canard enchaîné and Libération, for reporting these allegations.

Le Pen was first elected to the French parliament in 1956 in a party led by right-wing shopkeeper leader Pierre Poujade. But they fell apart and Le Pen briefly returned to the Algerian army. By 1962 he had lost his seat in the National Assembly and would spend the next ten years in the political wilderness.

In 1965 as campaign manager for right-wing presidential candidate Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour, Le Pen defended Marshal Pétain's wartime government, which supported Nazi Germany.

“Was General de Gaulle more courageous than Marshal Pétain in the occupied territories? This is uncertain. It was much easier to resist in London than to resist in France,” he said.

It was during that election campaign that he lost the sight in his left eye. He wore an eye patch for several years – leading to political punch-up stories. In fact, he had lost it while pitching his tent.

“While I was holding the gate… I was shocked in my eyes, I had to be hospitalized. Retinal detachment,” he would write in a memoir years later.

It wasn't until 1972 that Le Pen's political rise really began. That year he built the The National Front (FN), a right-wing party created to unite the nationalist movement in France.

In the beginning, the group did not have much support. Le Pen ran for president in 1974 for the FN, but received less than 1% of the vote. In 1981 he failed to even get enough signatures on his nomination form to be injured.

But the party gradually attracted voters with its increasingly strict anti-immigration policy.

The south of France in particular – where a large number of North African immigrants had come to settle – began to swing behind the FN. In the 1984 European elections, it received 10% of the vote.

Le Pen herself won a seat in the European Parliament, which she will hold for more than 30 years.

As a Member of Parliament he has expressed his hatred for the European Union and what he sees as its interference in French affairs. He will later call the euro the “working currency”.

But the rise of his political fortunes did not stop him from expressing shocking views.

In an infamous interview in 1987, he downplayed the Holocaust – the killing of six million Jews in Nazi Germany. “I am not saying that the gas chambers did not exist. I have never seen them personally,” he told his interviewer. “I have not studied this issue specifically, but I believe it is a point of information in the history of the Second World War.”

His comments about this information he would do all his work.

Regardless of the controversy, his popularity grew. In the 1988 presidential election, he took 14% of the vote. That number increased to 15% in 1995.

Then came 2002. With many candidates splitting support from opposition parties, Jean-Marie Le Pen entered the second and final round of the presidential election.

The result caused a shock in the French public. More than a million protesters took to the streets against Le Pen's views.

This political leader inspired so much disgust that political parties asked their followers to support President Jacques Chirac for a second term. Chirac took 82% of the vote, the biggest victory in French political history.

Le Pen will run for president again, in 2007, but at that time his political star had waned. Le Pen, then the oldest ever presidential candidate, came fourth.

A few months after that vote, the newly elected President Nicolas Sarkozy – whom Le Pen had attacked as a “foreigner”, because of his Greek, Jewish and Hungarian ancestry – took the FN's main campaign themes of national security and immigration in the legislative elections, and put it in the context of his intention to follow the votes. in FN.

It swept the carpet under the FN. Le Pen's party failed to win a single seat in the National Assembly and, plagued by financial problems, he announced plans to sell his party's headquarters outside Paris.

In 2011, he resigned as party leader and was replaced by his daughter, Marine.

Father and daughter fell immediately. Marine le Pen consciously moved the party away from her father's extreme policies, to make it more attractive to mainstream Eurosceptic voters.

Then the relationship deteriorated beyond repair.

In 2015, Jean-Marie Le Pen did it again this information, his denial of the Holocaust, in a radio interview. After months of legal wrangling, FN party members finally voted to fire their own founder.

Two years later, during his presidential campaign, Marine changed the party's name to National Rallyor National Rally.

His father condemned this act and said it was suicidal.

But Jean-Marie Le Pen remained unmoved.

“The data was in 1987. Then it came back in 2015. It's not like that every day!” he told the BBC in an interview in 2017.

He's even shown firmness about being at loggerheads with his family — at least in public.

“It's life! Life is not a quiet stream,” he said.

“I'm used to hardship. I've been rowing against the tide for 60 years. We've never once had the wind at our backs! No really, the one thing we were never used to was an easy life!”