Jean Louis Marie "Jean-Marie" Le Pen (; ; 20 June 1928 – 7 January 2025) was a French politician who founded the far-right National Front (now National Rally) party. He served as the party's president from 1972 to 2011 and as its honorary president from 2011 to 2015.
Born in Brittany, Le Pen focused on issues related to immigration to France, the European Union, traditional culture and values, law and order, and France's high rate of unemployment. His progression in the 1980s is known as the " of minds" due to its noticeable effect on mainstream political opinion. His controversial speeches and his integration into public life made him a figure who polarized opinion. He was convicted of statements downplaying the Holocaust, and fined for incitement to discrimination regarding remarks made about Muslims in France. He was expelled from the party by his daughter Marine in 2015 after making further controversial statements.
Le Pen's longevity in politics and his five attempts to become president of France made him a major figure in French political life. His unexpected progress to the second round in the 2002 presidential election—when he was beaten in a landslide by incumbent Jacques Chirac—left its mark on French public life, and the "21st of April" is now a frequently used expression in France. He served three terms in the National Assembly and was a member of the European Parliament (MEP) from 1984 to 2019.
Life and career
Early life Jean Louis Marie Le Pen was the only son of Jean Le Pen (1901–1942). Jean Le Pen was born in Brittany, like his ancestors, and had started work at the age of 13 on a transatlantic vessel. He was the president of the Association des Anciens Combattants, a fisherman, and a municipal councillor of La Trinité-sur-Mer, a small seaside village in Brittany.Le Pen, Jean-Marie. p45 Jean-Marie Le Pen's mother, Anne-Marie Hervé (1904–1965), was a seamstress and also of local ancestry.Le Pen, Jean-Marie. p16 His mother was a speaker of the Breton language, and Le Pen would say in his old age that his only regret was not learning the language.
Le Pen was born in La Trinité-sur-Mer on 20 June 1928. He was orphaned as an adolescent (Ward of the Nation, brought up by the state), when his father's boat La Persévérance was blown up by a mine in 1942.Le Pen, Jean-Marie, p82Fauchoux, Marc and Forcari, Christophe. p42 He was raised as a Roman Catholic and studied at the Jesuit in Vannes,Le Pen, Jean-Marie, p72 then at the in Lorient.Le Pen, Jean-Marie, p94
In November 1944, aged 16, Le Pen was turned down (because of his age) by Colonel Henri de La Vaissière (then representative of the Communist Youth) when he attempted to join the French Forces of the Interior (FFI).Quand Le Pen voulait rejoindre les FFI , L'Express, 28 March 2007 He then entered the faculty of law in Paris, and started to sell the monarchist Action Française newspaper, Aspects de la France, in the street. He was repeatedly convicted of assault and battery (coups et blessures).
Le Pen started his political career as the head of the student union in Toulouse. He became president of the Association Corporative des étudiants en droit, an association of law students whose main occupation was to engage in street brawls against the cocos (communists). He was excluded from this organisation in 1951.
After his time in the military, Le Pen studied political science and law at Panthéon-Assas University. His graduate thesis, submitted in 1971 by him and Jean-Loup Vincent, was titled Le courant anarchiste en France depuis 1945 ("The anarchist movement in France since 1945").
Military service After receiving his law degree, Le Pen enlisted in the Foreign Legion. He arrived in French Indochina after the 1954 battle of Dien Bien Phu, which France had lost and which prompted Prime Minister Pierre Mendès France to put an end to the Indochinese war at the Geneva Conference. Le Pen then was sent to the Suez in 1956, but arrived only after the cease-fire.
In 1953, a year before the beginning of the Algerian War, he contacted President Vincent Auriol, who approved Le Pen's proposed volunteer disaster relief project after a flood in the Netherlands. Within two days, there were 40 volunteers from his university, a group that would later help victims of an earthquake in Italy. In Paris in 1956, he was elected to the National Assembly as a member of Pierre Poujade's populist UDCA party. Le Pen often presented himself as the youngest member of the Assembly, but a young communist, , 27 years old and half a year younger, was elected in the same year.
In 1957, Le Pen became the general secretary of the , a veterans' organization. The next year, following his break with Poujade, he was re-elected to the National Assembly as a member of the Centre National des Indépendants et Paysans (CNIP) party, led by Antoine Pinay.
Le Pen claimed that he had lost his left eye when he was savagely beaten during the 1958 election campaign. Testimonies suggest that he was only wounded in the right eye and did not lose it. He lost the sight in his left eye years later, due to an illness. (Popular belief was that he wore a glass eye.) During the 1950s, Le Pen took a close interest in the Algerian War (which lasted from 1954 to 1962) and the French defence budget.
Elected to parliament under the Poujadist banner, Le Pen voluntarily reengaged himself for two to three months in the Foreign Legion. He was then sent to Algeria in 1957 as an intelligence officer. He was accused of having engaged in torture. Le Pen denied these accusations, although he admitted knowing of its use. Le Pen also criticised President Charles de Gaulle for granting Algeria independence, accusing him of "helping make France small".
Far-right politics He directed the 1965 presidential campaign of far-right candidate Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour, who obtained 5.19% of the votes. Le Pen insisted on the rehabilitation of the Collaborationists, declaring that:
In 1962, Le Pen lost his seat in the Assembly. In 1963, he created the Société d'études et de relations publiques (Serp), a company involved in the music industry that specialized in historical recordings and sold recordings of the choir of the CGT trade union and songs of the Popular Front, as well as Nazi marches.
National Front In 1972, Le Pen founded the Front National (FN) party. He then ran in the 1974 presidential election, obtaining 0.74% of the vote. In 1976, his Parisian apartment was blown up with dynamite (he had been living at that time in his mansion of Montretout in Saint-Cloud). The crime was never solved. Le Pen then failed to obtain the 500 signatures from "grand electors" (grands électeurs, mayors, etc.) necessary to present himself in the 1981 presidential election, won by the candidate of the Socialist Party (PS), François Mitterrand.
Criticising immigration and taking advantage of the economic crisis striking France and the world since the 1973 oil crisis, Le Pen's party managed to increase its support in the 1980s, starting in the municipal elections of 1983. His popularity was higher in the south and east of France. The FN obtained 16 seats in the 1984 European elections. A total of 35 FN deputies – including Le Pen, who was elected for Paris – entered the National Assembly after the 1986 elections (the only legislative elections held under proportional representation).
In 1984, Le Pen won a seat in the European Parliament and was consistently reelected since then. In 1988 he lost his reelection bid for the National Assembly in Bouches-du-Rhône's 8th constituency when he was defeated in the second round by Socialist .Marius Masse biography In 1991 Le Pen's invitation to London by Conservative MPs was militantly protested by large numbers coordinated by the Campaign Against Fascism in Europe (CAFE), which led to a surge of anti-fascist groups and activity across Europe. In 1992 and 1998 he was elected to the Regional Council of Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur.
Le Pen ran for president in the 1974, 1981, 1988, 1995, 2002 and 2007 elections. As noted above, he was not able to run for office in 1981, as he failed to gather the necessary 500 signatures of elected officials. Whereas in 1974 he secured only 0.75% of the vote, in 1988 he obtained 14.39% of votes, increasing his electoral performance almost twentyfold. In the 2002 election, Le Pen secured 16.86% of the votes in the first round of voting, obtaining second place after incumbent President Jacques Chirac in a major upset. This was enough to qualify him for the second round, as a result of the poor showing by the center-left PS candidate and incumbent prime minister Lionel Jospin and the scattering of votes between 15 other candidates. This was a major political event, both nationally and internationally, as it was the first time someone with such far-right views had qualified for the second round of a French presidential election. There was a widespread stirring of national public opinion as virtually the entire French political spectrum from the centre-right to the left united in fierce opposition to Le Pen's ideas. More than one million people in France took part in street rallies; slogans such as "A crook is better than a fascist" (Un escroc mieux qu'un facho) and "Graft rather than hate, Chirac rather than Le Pen" (L'arnaque plutôt que la haine, Chirac plutôt que Le Pen) were heard in opposition to Le Pen. Le Pen was then defeated by a large margin in the second round, in which President Chirac obtained 82% of the votes, thus securing the biggest majority in the history of the Fifth Republic.
In the 2004 regional elections, Le Pen intended to run for office in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region but was prevented from doing so because he did not meet the conditions for being a voter in that region: he neither lived there nor was registered as a taxpayer there. However, he was planned to be the FN's top candidate in the region for the 2010 regional elections.
Le Pen again ran in the 2007 presidential election and finished fourth with 10.44%, experiencing a significant decline. His 2007 campaign, at the age of 78 years and 9 months, made him the oldest presidential candidate in French history.
Le Pen was a vocal critic of the European Reform Treaty (formally known as the Treaty of Lisbon) which was signed by EU member states on 13 December 2007 and entered into force on 1 December 2009. In October 2007, Le Pen suggested that he would personally visit Ireland to assist the "No" campaign but finally changed his mind, fearing that his presence would be more of a hindrance than a benefit to the campaign. Ireland finally refused to ratify the treaty. Ireland was the only EU country that held a citizen referendum. All other EU states, including France, ratified the treaty by parliamentary vote, despite a previous citizen referendum where over 55% of French voters rejected the European Reform Treaty (although that vote was on a different draft of the Treaty in the form of the Constitutional Treaty). After the Irish "No" vote, Le Pen addressed the French President Nicolas Sarkozy in the European Parliament, accusing him of furthering the agenda of a "cabal of international finance and free market fanatics". Ireland later accepted the treaty in a second Lisbon referendum.
After Le Pen left office in January 2011, his daughter Marine Le Pen was elected by the adherents of the party over Bruno Gollnisch. He became honorary chairman of the party and won his seat again at the European elections in 2014.