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. Jean-Marie Le Pen's mother, Anne-Marie Hervé (1904–1965), was a seamstress and also of local ancestry. His mother was a speaker of the
Breton language, and Le Pen would say in his old age that his only regret was not to learn 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. He was raised as a Roman Catholic and studied at the
Jesuit in
Vannes, then at the in
Lorient. 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). 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). 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, 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. 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.
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. 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 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 in the presidential elections in 1974, 1988, 1995, 2002, and 2007. 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. In the
presidential elections of 2002, Le Pen obtained 16.86% of the votes in the first round of voting, obtaining second place after incumbent President Jacques Chirac. 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. 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. On 4 May 2015, Le Pen was suspended from the party after refusing to attend his disciplinary hearing for repeating his description of the
Nazi gas chambers used in
concentration camps during the
Holocaust, as a "detail" of World War II and speaking favorably of Nazi collaborator Marshal
Philippe Pétain. He had originally been fined 183,200 euros for saying in 1987 that "I'm not saying the gas chambers didn't exist. I haven't seen them myself. I haven't particularly studied the question. But I believe it's just a detail in the history of World War II." In 1996, he stated that "If you take a 1,000-page book on World War II, the concentration camps take up only two pages and the gas chambers 10 to 15 lines. This is what one calls a detail," and he made similar statements before the
European Parliament in 2008 and 2009. A French court decided in June 2015 to cancel his suspension; although the members of the party were to hold a vote to accept or reject a whole series of measures aiming at changing the
National Front's status, including Le Pen's honorary presidency. On 10 July another French court ruled to suspend the vote two days beforehand and urged the party to organize an in-person Congress, as Le Pen sued the National Front again. The party decided to appeal against both of these decisions. The FN then decided, on 29 July, to count the votes on the suppression of Le Pen's Honorary Presidency, which showed that 94% of the members were in favour of this decision. However, due to the legal challenges to the FN's removal of Le Pen as its honorary president, he continued to officially hold the position. In August 2015, Le Pen was expelled from the National Front after a special party congress. He later founded the
Comités Jeanne.
Blue, White and Red Rally Blue, White and Red Rally () is a
French nationalist political association founded by Le Pen on 5 September 2015 after his August expulsion from the FN. He told supporters in the city: 'You will not be orphans. We can act in a similar way to the FN, even if we are not part of it.' He confirmed he would support his granddaughter
Marion Maréchal-Le Pen for the next regional elections and that he wanted to influence the
National Front's ideology with his association. He also praised Marine Le Pen's speech in Marseille on 6 September 2015, describing it as "lepéniste".
Personal life, wealth, and security 's annual march to the statue of
Joan of Arc,
Place des Pyramides,
Paris,
May Day 2007 Le Pen's marriage to
Pierrette Le Pen from 29 June 1960 to 18 March 1987 produced three daughters, who gave him eight grandchildren. The break-up of the marriage was somewhat dramatic, with his ex-wife posing nude, to ridicule him, in the French edition of
Playboy. The two married again in a religious marriage in 2021, in a ceremony presided by
traditionalist Catholic priest
Philippe Laguérie. In 1977, Le Pen inherited a fortune from Hubert Lambert (1934–1976), son of the cement industrialist Leon Lambert (1877–1952), one of three sons of Lambert Cement founder Hilaire Lambert. Hubert Lambert was a political supporter of Le Pen and a
monarchist as well. With his wife, he also owned a two-storey townhouse on the Rue Hortense in
Rueil-Malmaison and another house in his hometown of
La Trinité-sur-Mer in
Brittany. In April 2024, Jean-Marie Le Pen was placed "under legal protection" at the request of his family.
Illness and death Le Pen was briefly hospitalized after a
minor stroke on 2 February 2022. He was hospitalized again on 15 April 2023, after suffering a "mild
heart attack" and was discharged from the hospital on 3 May. In April 2024, Le Pen experienced another heart attack. Le Pen died at a care facility in
Garches,
Hauts-de-Seine, on 7 January 2025, aged 96. He had been in failing health due to complications from the heart attack he suffered in 2024. Le Pen's daughter Marine, who succeeded him at the helm of the National Front, learned about his death from journalists on a stopover in Nairobi, Kenya, while travelling from
Mayotte to Paris. The announcement of her father's death had first been made to Agence France-Presse (AFP) by the Le Pen family. Le Pen was buried in a private ceremony following a Mass in his hometown,
La Trinité-sur-Mer, on 11 January. A public memorial ceremony was held at the
Notre-Dame du Val-de-Grâce church in Paris on 16 January. President
Emmanuel Macron said that history would decide the legacy of Le Pen, while prime minister
François Bayrou said "We knew, by fighting him, what a fighter he was". Left-winger
Jean-Luc Mélenchon said that respect for the dead and the bereaved could not excuse "the hatred, racism, Islamophobia and anti-Semitism that he spread". Later, his cemetery was vandalized, which also caused condemnation from French politicians. ==Issues and policy positions==