Jean-Marie Le Pen

Jean-Marie Le Pen was born in La Trinité-sur-Mer in Brittany. He served as a Foreign Legion paratrooper in Indochina and in 1956 became France's youngest deputy as a supporter of Pierre Poujade, before serving as an intelligence officer in Algeria. He founded the Front National in 1972 and led it until 2011. He ran for president several times, and in 2002 eliminated the Socialist Lionel Jospin with 16.86 percent before losing the runoff to Jacques Chirac. He sat in the European Parliament from 1984 to 2019. He was expelled from the party in 2015 after a dispute with his daughter Marine, and died in January 2025, aged 96.

Supporters saw Le Pen as a voice for working-class and small-town voters who felt ignored by the mainstream parties, and his movement, renamed the National Rally in 2018, became one of France's largest political forces. Critics describe the party he built as xenophobic and racist, and he was convicted several times. French courts punished him for calling the Nazi gas chambers a "detail" of the history of the Second World War, a remark made in 1987 and repeated later, and a Munich court convicted him in 1999 for minimizing the Holocaust. He was also fined for inciting racial hatred against Muslims in 2005 and again in 2008. Allegations that he took part in torture in Algeria followed him for decades; he denied them. His third public reference to the gas chambers as a detail of history led to his 2015 expulsion from the party.