Jean-Marie Le Pen
Jean Louis Marie Le Pen, commonly known as Jean-Marie Le Pen, was a French politician, lawyer and activist. He founded the far-right National Front party and served as the party's president from 1972 to 2011 and as its honorary president from 2011 to 2015.
Born in Brittany, Le Pen focused on issues related to immigration to France, the European Union, traditional culture and values, law and order, and France's high rate of unemployment. His progression in the 1980s is known as the " of minds" due to its noticeable effect on mainstream political opinion. His controversial speeches and his integration into public life made him a figure who polarized opinion. He was convicted of statements downplaying the Holocaust, and fined for incitement to discrimination regarding remarks made about Muslims in France. He was expelled from the party by his daughter Marine in 2015 after making controversial statements.
Le Pen's longevity in politics and his five attempts to become president of France made him a major figure in French political life. His unexpected progress to the second round in the 2002 presidential election—when he was beaten in a landslide by incumbent Jacques Chirac—left its mark on French public life, and the "21st of April" is now a frequently used expression in France. He served three terms in the National Assembly and was a member of the European Parliament from 1984 to 2019.
Life and career
Early life
Jean Louis Marie Le Pen was the only son of Jean Le Pen. 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, 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, 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 by Colonel Henri de La Vaissière when he attempted to join the French Forces of the Interior. 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.
Le Pen started his political career as the head of the student union in Toulouse. He became president of the Association Corporative des étudiants en droit, an association of law students whose main occupation was to engage in street brawls against the cocos. He was excluded from this organisation in 1951.
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.
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, which France had lost and which prompted Prime Minister Pierre Mendès France to put an end to the Indochinese war at the Geneva Conference. Le Pen then was sent to the Suez in 1956, but arrived only after the cease-fire.In 1953, a year before the beginning of the Algerian War, he contacted President Vincent Auriol, who approved Le Pen's proposed volunteer disaster relief project after a flood in the Netherlands. Within two days, there were 40 volunteers from his university, a group that would later help victims of an earthquake in Italy. In Paris in 1956, he was elected to the National Assembly as a member of Pierre Poujade's populist UDCA party. Le Pen often presented himself as the youngest member of the Assembly, 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 party, led by Antoine Pinay.
Le Pen claimed that he had lost his left eye when he was savagely beaten during the 1958 election campaign. 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. During the 1950s, Le Pen took a close interest in the Algerian War 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. Le Pen denied these accusations, although he admitted knowing of its use. Le Pen also criticised President Charles de Gaulle for granting Algeria independence, accusing him of "helping make France small".
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 , 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 party. He then ran in the 1974 presidential election, obtaining 0.74% of the vote. In 1976, his Parisian apartment was blown up with dynamite. The crime was never solved. Le Pen then failed to obtain the 500 signatures from "grand electors" necessary to present himself in the 1981 presidential election, won by the candidate of the Socialist Party, François Mitterrand.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 – entered the National Assembly after the 1986 elections.
In 1984, Le Pen won a seat in the European Parliament and was consistently reelected since then. In 1988 he lost his reelection bid for the National Assembly in Bouches-du-Rhône's 8th constituency when he was defeated in the second round by Socialist. 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, 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" and "Graft rather than hate, Chirac rather than 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 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. 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.
Le Pen dismissed the hearing as a 'mockery' and an 'ambush' and accused Ms. Le Pen of pulling the strings from afar. 'It's dirty to kill your own daddy, so she didn't kill daddy directly, she did it through her henchman,' Mr. Le Pen told French radio at the time. The elder Le Pen was a persistent problem for his daughter as she tried to smooth over the overt racism and xenophobia of the party's past. The final straw came in April when he rehashed familiar comments about the gas chambers and said France should get along with Russia to save the 'white world'. Ms. Le Pen then openly split with her father, saying he was committing 'political suicide'. But he vowed to 'reconquer' the party he founded in 1972.
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.