Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the far-right Front National party, which exploited working-class fears about immigration and globalization and built a career on rhetoric seen by many as racist and xenophobic, has died at the age of 96.
His death was announced by his daughter Marine Le Pen's political party, National Rally.
Jean-Marie Le Pen spent his life fighting, whether as a soldier in the French colonial wars, as the founder of the Front National (for which he ran in five presidential elections), or in disputes with his daughters and ex-wife, which were often conducted in public.
Controversy has been a constant companion for Le Pen. Accusations of racism, anti-Semitism and homophobia dogged the National Front when he co-founded the party in 1972.
In the early years of the AIDS crisis, Le Pen suggested that patients should be isolated in separate facilities.
In 1996, he was tried, convicted and fined for questioning war crimes after declaring that Nazi gas chambers were “merely a detail” of World War II history and that the Nazi occupation of France “was not particularly inhumane.”
The comments sparked outrage in France, where police arrested thousands of Jews who were deported to the Auschwitz death camp.
“I stand by it because I think it's true,” Le Pen said in 2015 when asked if she regretted the gas chamber comment, which angered his daughter Marine.
In recent years, Le Pen has made Islam and Muslim immigrants her main target, blaming them for France's economic and social woes. He once told the Associated Press that “I would despair if I discovered the culture of Brooklyn, France.”
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Marine Le Pen learned about her father's death during a stopover in Kenya after returning from the USA A cyclone hit the French overseas territory of Mayotte.
Jordan Bardella, president of the National Assembly, praised him for “always serving France, defending its identity and sovereignty.”
Commenting on Le Pen's death, President Emmanuel Macron said: “A historic figure of the far right, he played a role in the public life of our country for almost 70 years that now belongs to the judgment of history.”
A populist and fiery speaker, Le Pen has helped rewrite the parameters of French politics over the course of her 40-year career, overcoming waves of voter discontent and capitalizing on dissatisfaction with immigration and job security.
He reached the second round of the 2002 presidential election but lost by a landslide to Jacques Chirac as voters preferred to support a mainstream conservative rather than return the far right to power for the first time since the rule of Nazi collaborators in the 1940s.
Le Pen was the scourge of the European Union, which he saw as a transnational project usurping the power of nation states, capitalizing on the kind of resentment felt by many Britons who later voted to leave the EU.
Born in Brittany in 1928, Le Pen studied law in Paris in the early 1950s and joined the Foreign Legion in 1953 as a paratrooper fighting in Indochina.
In the late 1950s, Le Pen campaigned to keep Algeria in France as an elected member of the French parliament and as a soldier in territory then controlled by France. He publicly justified the use of torture, but he himself denied using such practices.
In his memoirs, he recalls losing an eye in 1965 when, while campaigning for a far-right presidential candidate, a tent pillar broke and hit him in the face before a rally. During this time, he founded a company with Léon Gaultier, formerly of Nazi Germany's Waffen-SS, that sowed the seeds for the National Front.
After years on the periphery of French politics, Le Pen's fortunes changed in 1977, when a millionaire bequeathed him a mansion near Paris along with 30 million francs, or about five million euros ($7.4 million CDN) in today's money.
This allowed Le Pen to pursue his ambitions and political program despite being rejected by traditional parties.
His first wife, Pierrette Lalanne, eloped with his biographer in the 1980s, posing semi-nude in Playboy to avenge a man she denounced as violent. She left Le Pen with one of his spare glass eyes and returned them only when he agreed to give her the ashes of her cremated mother.
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Le Pen continued to vent white working-class anger over immigration and resentment against Paris's business and political elites, and the Front National gained ground in local, regional and then European elections.
Traditional parties have tried to win back voters with tougher talks on immigration. This tactic helped conservative Nicolas Sarkozy secure the presidency in 2007, and a tough approach to crime and immigration has now become more mainstream.
In 2011, after maintaining tight control over the National Front, Le Pen was replaced as party leader by her daughter Marine, who led a campaign to shed the party's persistent image as anti-Semitic and rebrand it as a defender of the working class.
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Le Pen left behind his wife Jeanne-Marie Paschos and three daughters: Marie-Caroline, Yann and Marine.
Marine Le Pen reached two rounds of the presidential elections, he lost to Macron twice. Although she is a presumptive candidate in the next presidential elections scheduled for 2027, she also faces potential prison time and a ban from running for political office in the embezzlement case.
Yann Le Pen is also embroiled in the case, accused of using money intended for EU parliament advisers to pay staff who instead performed political work for the party between 2004 and 2016, in violation of the 27-nation bloc's regulations. Jean-Marie Le Pen was found unfit to testify.