Jean-Marie Le Pen, a Holocaust denier and right-wing extremist who led the French far-right National Front Party, died on Tuesday. He was 96 years old.
His family told AFP that he died in a care facility “surrounded by his loved ones.”
Le Pen founded the National Front in 1972. In 2002, he reached the presidential election run-off against then-French President Jacques Chirac.
He called the Nazis’ use of gas chambers a mere “detail” of history and said that Philippe Pétain, France’s collaborationist leader during World War II, was not a traitor. Le Pen was convicted several times for his inciting statements.
Le Pen’s daughter, Marine, took over as party leader in 2011. She revamped the party, renaming it National Rally and gradually replacing her father’s images with her own.
In an effort to break with the party’s antisemitic past, she expelled her father from the party in 2015.
She then turned National Rally into a major political force, with the party making its best showing in the last elections this summer. On June 30, 2024, the National Rally topped the country’s first round of legislative elections, though it failed to secure a majority in the second round on July 7, 2024.
Marine’s protégé, Jordan Bardella, 28, was elected as party president in 2022.
Upon Jean-Marie’s death, Bardella said he had “always served France” and “defended its identity and sovereignty.”
Since its reimagining, the party has endeavored to reach out to Jewish voters. In an op-ed in Le Figaro on June 22, 2024, Marine Le Pen censured the far-left and the party of French President Emmanuel Macron for allowing antisemitism to fester in France in the wake of the rape of a Jewish girl.
“The latest act to date, the appalling rape of this 12-year-old girl, because she is Jewish, stirs my heart and should revolt the whole of France,” Le Pen wrote.
An attack on the Jews of France is an attack on all French, she said: “By attacking a part of us, they are attacking us! Let us never doubt it.”
She also rejected accusations of antisemitism by her detractors, saying “never, ever, have I tolerated in my movement the slightest compromise with antisemitic or revisionist ideas.
“With my friends, at the head of the NR, with Jordan, we have always been very clear about our condemnation of antisemitic hatred, the rewriting or trivialization of the history of the Shoah,” she wrote.