For half a century, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the National Front who has died aged 96, has remained on the far-right fringes of French politics – xenophobic, nostalgic for France’s colonial past, and ambivalent about those who cooperated with France. Nazis during World War II.

But in the years before his death, Le Pen’s nationalist, anti-immigration ideology found an increasingly loud echo in French anxiety about identity and industrial decline. This has helped his party, now led by his daughter Marine, reach the political mainstream and inspire other far-right politicians across Europe.

In the 1974 presidential election, two years after the National Front was founded, Le Pen attracted less than 1 percent of the popular vote.

In 2022, Marine Le Pen — who renamed the National Rally, or National Rally — scored 41.5 percent in the runoff won by Emmanuel Macron for his second term as president. In snap elections called by Macron in 2024, the party emerged as the single largest force in France’s lower house, the National Assembly.

Elsewhere in Europe, like-minded politicians have made strong electoral gains and, in some cases, entered and led government.

“My ideas were ahead of their time,” Jean-Marie Le Pen said in 2018. “They correspond to today’s realities, and I see pessimistically the demographic consequences that lead to a breaking global migration wave.”

However, while his ideas gained popularity, Le Pen long remained a political pariah in France. In 2002, when he unexpectedly qualified for the second round of the presidential election – at the expense of Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin – massive anti-far-right protests erupted across the country. Jacques Chirac, the center-right candidate, was re-elected with 82.2 percent of the vote.

Le Pen’s anti-Semitic comments have caused ongoing legal problems. Even his daughter resorted to expelling him from the party when she embarked on a “detox” before her presidential campaign.

This did not prevent the patriarch from expressing his xenophobic views nor from criticizing his daughter’s strategy.

“If you stop being a devil and detox, you will become a right-winger [of the centre-right]“He told the Financial Times 2015 interview At his mansion in the affluent Paris suburb of Saint-Cloud, which featured a life-sized painting of him dressed as a pirate. “The National Front no longer has a reason to exist.”

Loban had always viewed himself as an outsider who enjoyed fighting. Recalling the street brawls that frequently broke out against communist sympathizers in his youth, he said with a laugh: “Back then, if you got hit, you hit it back. You wouldn’t go to the police and file a complaint like these days. It was a more manly civilization.”

This rebellious mentality stems in part from a harsh upbringing in La Trinité-sur-Mer, a seaside town in southern Brittany. Lu Pen was born on June 20, 1928, under the Chinese sign of the Dragon, he wrote in his memoirs in 2018. The village house that his farmer parents shared with another family had a dirt floor. As was often the case in Catholic families, Le Pen was an altar boy. Later, he paid for his law studies in Paris by working as a postman, coal miner, and fisherman.

World War II made him a fierce patriot. His father died in 1942 when a mine exploded on his fishing boat. Le Pen said he considered killing a German soldier in retaliation, and at one point tried to join the French Resistance. But he also resented France’s British allies, who were responsible for reducing local towns to ruins, he wrote in his memoirs. After the war, he directed his anger at Charles de Gaulle.

He aimed to become an “absolute” opponent of the general who had fled to London and organized French resistance to the German occupation, accusing him of “selling out France”. [colonial] Empire” and the shrinking of France.

“In fact, there are two de Gaulles: the rebel of 1940 and the rebel hunter [French soldiers opposed to Algerian independence] “In 1961,” Le Pen wrote, “they both constitute a false great man whose destiny was to help France become small.” He complained of the unfair treatment received by Philippe Pétain, a military marshal and World War I hero, who in 1945 was convicted of treason for leading the collaborationist Vichy regime during World War II.

The process of decolonization fueled Le Pen’s nationalist ideals. He enlisted as a French soldier in the Indochina and Algerian wars of independence, and later alluded to torture by French forces in his descriptions of how he and others interrogated Algerian suspects.

“While I was growing and rising in fame, my country was shrinking to the point of complete change, in a way unprecedented in 2,000 years of history,” he wrote. “This strange phenomenon has been the fuel of my political life and the sadness of my life.”

In 1956, he won his first election as MP from French populist politician Pierre Poujade, who led an anti-tax, anti-immigration, anti-establishment party of shopkeepers.

The far-right parties joined forces in 1972 under the leadership of the newly created National Front and chose Le Pen as its president. Four years later, his Parisian apartment was dynamited. The perpetrators were not found.

Le Pen has made controversy her political trademark. In a 1987 television program, he disparaged the Nazi gas chambers as “a detail of World War II.” In 2009, he was convicted of crimes against humanity during the Nazi occupation. French authorities also suspected that he was hiding several million euros in Switzerland.

Over the years, he has increasingly directed his anger at Muslim immigrants, warning of a looming clash of civilizations, and embracing the idea of ​​the “Great Replacement,” a popular theory in far-right circles about a supposed conspiracy to replace whites with Muslim immigrants. (France has the largest Muslim population in Western Europe, accounting for about a tenth of the population of 66 million, according to statistics.)

“When there is one immigrant family in your building, there is no problem, but when there are three, four or five, you become a minority in your country,” he told the Financial Times in his office filled with books and statues of Joan of Arc. A Catholic who fought English invaders – and model ships.

In old age, Le Pen criticized his daughter Marine’s policies, including her embrace of Gaullist economics in which the state should play a prominent role. He explained that he feels close to his granddaughter and Maréchal’s niece, Marion Maréchal, a conservative Catholic who was an MP for the National Front between 2012 and 2017 and broke with the party by supporting another far-right presidential candidate, Eric Zemmour, in 2022.

But under the leadership of Marine Le Pen, the party is closer to the Elysee than ever before elections in 2027.

When he wrote his memoirs, Jean-Marie Le Pen had few regrets about his political career: “I can admit it, touch wood: I had a good life.”