Remembering Jean-Marie Le Pen, France’s Instrument of Right-Wing Populist Discontent 

Jean-Marie Le Pen, erstwhile leader of France’s political party National Front (now National Rally), died on Tuesday at the age of 96. For more than 50 years, Le Pen was a mainstay in French politics, known for his outspoken views on limiting immigration to France and Europe. Quick-witted and incendiary, his surprise elevation to the runoff in the 2002 presidential election in France showed that he was an instrument of populist discontent.  

The rebranded party he founded is on the rise in French politics as France confronts major social unrest and a strained economic situation. The country experienced mass unrest and riots in 2023 when French police killed a 17-year-old French citizen who was of North African descent. And the specter of terrorist attacks continues to hang over the entire nation after the terrorist attack on history teacher Samuel Paty in 2020 and the murder of journalists at the French magazine Charlie Hebdo in 2015. 

Le Pen grew up a Catholic in Brittany where he was educated by the Jesuits and attended high school at the seaport town of Lorient. He subsequently moved to the French capital to study law at the University of Paris. Le Pen served in the French Foreign Legion in Indochina and was a French intelligence officer in Algeria during its war of independence from France. He joined the National Assembly, the lower house of the French Parliament, in 1956. He founded his own political party, National Front, in 1972. More recently, he served for more than a decade in the European Parliament. 

His daughter, Marine Le Pen, assumed leadership over his party in 2011, which eventually sparked a family feud. The elder Le Pen had, among other controversies, been fined by a French court in 1996 for referring to the Nazi gas chambers as “merely a detail” and to the German occupation of France during World War II as “not especially inhumane.” Thousands of Jews in France suffered deportation and were murdered in the Holocaust as a result of the German occupation.  

Le Pen refused to walk back the Holocaust comment in 2015, and his daughter expelled him from the party he had founded. She also changed its name to the National Rally and she revoked its more socially conservative positions like opposition to abortion. The French Parliament overwhelmingly supported adding the “right” to an abortion to the French constitution in March 2024, a stark departure for the nation once considered the “eldest daughter” of the pro-life Catholic Church. 

But the distancing that was prevalent nearly a decade ago was largely absent from the party’s reaction to Le Pen’s death this week. Jordan Bardella, the current president of the National Rally, in a statement on X, called the elder Le Pen the “tribune of the people in the National Assembly” and someone who “always served France, defended its identity and its sovereignty.”

The senior Le Pen’s party, however different from the organization he initially started, appears to be in the strongest position that it has ever been in. It sent a groundbreaking number of representatives to the lower house of the French Parliament in 2022 and only cemented its strength when French President Emmanuel Macron called snap elections in 2024. In those elections, National Rally earned almost a third of the French vote and nearly twice what Macron’s party won. Likewise, Marine Le Pen’s vote shares in the French presidential elections have only grown since 2012.  

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