Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of the French far-right

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

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

Le Pen's supporters saw him as a charismatic everyman advocate who wasn't afraid to speak out on tough topics.

And for several decades he was considered France's most controversial political figure.

His critics denounced him as a far-right fanatic and the courts convicted him several times for his radical statements.

A Holocaust denier and unrepentant extremist on race, gender and immigration, he devoted his political career to imposing himself and his views on the French political mainstream.

The so-called Devil of the Republic came second in the 2002 French presidential election, but was decisively defeated. This devil had to be removed from the National Front if it was to progress further – a process that became known as “de-demonisation”.

For his part, 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 an opinion about Le Pen. In 2015 Marine Le Pen kicked her father out of the National Front, which he founded four decades ago.

“Perhaps by getting rid of me she wanted to make some kind of gesture towards the establishment,” he would later tell the BBC's Hugh Schofield.

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

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

He lost his father at age 14 when his fishing boat hit a German mine. Le Pen became a Ward of the nation – the term the French authorities use for those whose parent is wounded or killed in war – which entitles them to state funding and support.

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

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

But his time in Algeria would define much of his politics and career.

He was posted there as an intelligence officer when the Algerians waged a brutal but ultimately successful war of independence against Paris.

Le Pen saw the loss of Algeria as one of the greatest betrayals in French history, fueling her hatred of World War II hero and then-president Charles de Gaulle, who ended the war for the colony.

During this war of independence, he claimed to have participated in the torture of Algerian prisoners, something he has always denied.

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

Le Pen was first elected to the French Parliament in 1956. in a party led by militant right-wing shopkeeper leader Pierre Poujad. But they fell out and Le Pen briefly returned to the army in Algeria. Until 1962 he loses his seat in the National Assembly and must spend the next decade in the political wasteland.

During a period from 1965 as campaign manager for far-right presidential candidate Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancourt, Le Pen defended the wartime government of Marshal Pétain, which supported the occupying Nazi German forces.

“Was General de Gaulle braver than Marshal Pétain in the occupied zone? This is not certain. It was much easier to resist in London than to resist in France.” he said.

During the election campaign, he lost the sight in his left eye. For several years he wore an eyepatch – which gave rise to stories of a political battle. In reality, he had lost it while pitching a tent.

“As I swing the hammer…shock in my eye, I need to be hospitalized. Retinal detachment,” years later he would write in his memoirs.

Only in 1972 the real political rise of Le Pen begins. This year he created National Front (FN), a far-right party created to unite the nationalist movement in France.

At first the party had little support. Le Pen ran for president in 1974. for the FN but won less than 1% of the vote. In 1981 he doesn't even get enough signatures on his nomination form to run.

But the party has gradually won voters with its increasingly strident anti-immigration policies.

The south of France in particular – where large numbers of North African immigrants had come to settle – began to swing behind the FN. In the 1984 European elections. she wins 10% of the vote.

Le Pen herself won a seat in the European Parliament that she would hold for more than 30 years.

As an MEP, he expressed his hatred of the European Union and what he saw as its interference in French affairs. He would later call the euro “the currency of occupation”.

But his growing political wealth hasn't stopped him from expressing shocking views.

In the famous interview in 1987 he downplays the Holocaust – the killing of six million Jews by Nazi Germany. “I'm not saying the gas chambers didn't exist. I've never seen them personally,” he told an interviewer. “I have never studied the matter specifically, but I believe they are a detail in the history of World War II.”

His comments on the details will pursue for the rest of his career.

Despite the controversy, his popularity is growing. In the 1988 presidential election. he took 14% of the vote. This figure rose to 15% in 1995.

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

The result caused a shock in French society. More than a million protesters took to the streets to oppose Le Pen's ideas.

The far-right politician has so disgusted the majority that parties across the political spectrum have called on their supporters to back President Jacques Chirac for a second term. Chirac took 82% of the vote, the largest victory in French political history.

Le Pen would run for president again in 2007, but by then his political star had faded. Le Pen, then the oldest candidate ever to run for the presidency, was fourth.

Within months of that vote, President-elect Nicolas Sarkozy – whom Le Pen had attacked as a “foreigner” because of his Greek, Jewish and Hungarian ancestry – seized on the FN's main campaign themes of national security and immigration in legislative elections, and stated openly that he intended to chase the FN votes.

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

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

Father and daughter had an argument almost immediately. Marine Le Pen has deliberately distanced the party from her father's more extreme policies to make it more attractive to mainstream Eurosceptics.

Then the relationship broke down beyond repair.

In 2015 Jean-Marie Le Pen repeated the detail his Holocaust denial in a radio interview. After months of bitter litigation, FN party members eventually voted to expel their own founder.

Two years later, during his own presidential campaign, Marin changed the party's name to National Assemblyor National Rally.

Her father condemned the move as suicide.

But Jean-Marie Le Pen remained unrepentant.

“The details were in 1987. They then returned in 2015. It's not exactly every day!” he told the BBC in a 2017 interview.

He even appeared upbeat about the rift with his family — at least publicly.

“This is life! Life is not a smooth calm stream,” he said.

“I'm used to adversity. For 60 years I rowed against the current. We never had the wind at our backs! No, really, one thing we're never used to is the easy life!”