Jean-Marie Le Pen
| Jean-Marie Le Pen | |
 Jean-Marie Le Pen with daughter Marine | |
Honorary Chairman of
the Alliance for Peace and Freedom | |
| In office 2018 – 7 January 2025 | |
| Leader | Roberto Fiore |
|---|---|
Leader of the Jeanne Committees
| |
| In office 22 March 2016 – 7 January 2025 | |
| Preceded by | Party established |
Honorary President of the National Front
| |
| In office 16 January 2011 – 20 August 2015 | |
| President | Marine Le Pen |
President of the National Front
| |
| In office 5 October 1972 – 15 January 2011 | |
| Preceded by | Party established |
| Succeeded by | Marine Le Pen |
| In office 1 July 2004 – 1 July 2019 | |
| Constituency | South-East France |
| In office 24 July 1984 – 10 April 2003 | |
| Constituency | France |
Member of the National Assembly
| |
| In office 2 April 1986 – 14 May 1988 | |
| Constituency | Seine |
| In office 9 December 1958 – 9 October 1962 | |
| Preceded by | Constituency established |
| Succeeded by | René Capitant |
| Constituency | Seine's 1st |
| In office 19 January 1956 – 5 December 1958 | |
| Constituency | Seine's 3rd |
Regional Councillor
| |
| In office 26 March 2010 – 13 December 2015 | |
| Constituency | Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur |
| In office 21 March 1986 – 22 March 1992 | |
| Constituency | Île-de-France |
Municipal Councillor of Paris
| |
| In office 13 March 1983 – 19 March 1989 | |
| Constituency | 20th arrondissement |
| Born | 20 June 1928 La Trinité-sur-Mer, Morbihan, France |
| Died | 7 January 2025 (aged 96) Garches, Hauts-de-Seine, France |
| Political party | Comités Jeanne(from 2016) |
| Other political affiliations |
|
| Spouse(s) |
|
| Children | 3; Marie-Caroline, Yann and Marine |
| Alma mater | Panthéon-Assas University |
| Profession | Lawyer, politician, activist |
| Military service | |
| Allegiance | French Fourth Republic |
| Service/branch | French Army French Foreign Legion |
| Years of service |
|
| Rank | First lieutenant |
Jean Louis Marie Le Pen, commonly known as Jean-Marie Le Pen (20 June 1928 – 7 January 2025), was a French-Breton officer, lawyer, politician and nationalist who served as President of the Front National (now the National Rally) from 1972 to 2011. From 16 January 2011 to 20 August 2015, he was the first and only Honorary President of the FN.
Contents
Life
Le Pen's was Jean Le Pen (1901–1942), president of the Association des Anciens Combattants and a municipal councillor of La Trinité-sur-Mer, a small seaside village in Brittany. His mother, Anne-Marie Hervé (1904–1965), was a seamstress and also of local ancestry. Le Pen was born 1928 in a Breton fishing village. The boy proved to be bright at an early age and attended good schools. He later said that he had acquired his passion for rhetoric from the Jesuits and boasted that apart from him, only François Mitterand was able to conjugate the subjunctive of the imperfect tense.His father's boat La Persévérance was blown up by a British mine in 1942. Thirty years later, together with Léon Gaultier (de), a former Untersturmführer of the Waffen-SS, he would found the Front National (FN), of which he remained chairman/president until 2011.
University
Le Pen studied political science and law at Panthéon-Assas University as of 1947. His graduate thesis was titled Le courant anarchiste en France depuis 1945 ("The anarchist movement in France since 1945").
Military
In 1953, Le Pen joined the French paratroopers. After the disastrous Battle of Dien Bien Phủ, he and his unit were transferred to East Asia and thus experienced the last weeks of the Indochina War. There, having now been promoted to officer (sous-lieutenant), he transferred to the paratroopers of the Foreign Legion (1er bataillon étranger de parachutistes). In 1956, after the Suez Crisis, Le Pen served briefly in Egypt.
Le Pen voluntarily reengaged himself for three months, October 1956 to January 1957, in the Foreign Legion. He was then sent to Algeria as an intelligence officer in the fight against the FLN (Front de Libération Nationale). Le Pen also criticised President Charles de Gaulle for granting Algeria independence, accusing him of "helping make France small".
Battles
- First Indochina War
- Suez Crisis
- Algerian War
Politics
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 (1949 to 1951), an fraternity of law students whose main occupation was to fight against the terror of the "Cocos" (communists). 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 UDCA populist party.
In 1957, Le Pen became the general secretary of the National Front of Combatants (FNC), a veterans' organization. The next year, following his break with Poujade, he was reelected to the National Assembly as a member of the Centre National des Indépendants et Paysans (CNIP) party, led by Antoine Pinay. Le Pen lost sight in his left eye after he was savagely beaten during the 1958 election campaign. He directed the 1965 presidential campaign of patriotic candidate Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour, who obtained 5.19% of the votes. Le Pen insisted on the rehabilitation of the Collaborationists, declaring that:
- Was General de Gaulle braver than Marshal Pétain in the occupied zone? It is not certain. It was much easier to resist in London than to resist in France.
In 1972, Le Pen founded the Front National (FN) party. He then ran in the 1974 presidential election. On 2 November 1976, a bomb attack was carried out on his apartment building in the 15th arrondissement. No one was injured, but the twenty kilograms of explosives left a crater in the stairwell. The perpetrator or perpetrators were never identified. The family later moved from there to Montretout, a property in Saint-Cloud that Le Pen had been bequeathed by a deceased wealthy supporter, the cement company heir Hubert Lambert. The building became the headquarters of the FN and was in Le Pen's possession and property until his death. His daughter Yann still lives there. Jean-Marie Le Pen lived in Rueil-Malmaison with his second wife Paschos.
In 1984, Le Pen won a seat in the European Parliament and was consistently reelected since then. Le Pen was cited in 1989 during the AIDS crisis saying:
- AIDS is a plague acquired through the the plague of homosexuality and its perpetrators should be isolated in special sanatoria.[1]
In December 1991 Jean-Marie Le Pen was guest-of-honour at a Western Goals Institute (WGI) formal dinner at London's Charing Cross Hotel, which resulted in a Far-Left riot in front of the hotel causing some damage and requiring a heavy police presence.[2]. In 1997, WGI circulated a leaflet to mainstream UK conservatives in which Le Pen is cited as saying "the millions of unassimilable black and Asian immigrants are NOT British."
The Institute added that "the time has come to embark upon an ambitious, well-funded and humane repatriation programme of all those non-British, non-European people who have come, or were born here, say, since 1960. They must adopt the citizenship of their and their families’ countries of origin."[3]
On 25 November 1998, the statement "I believe in racial inequality," made at a FN event in 1996, led to a conviction. Jean-Marie Le Pen and Bruno Maigret had to pay 10,000 francs to the Union des étudiants juifs de France.
In 2004, he was fined 10,000 euros for "inciting discrimination, hatred and violence against a group of people because of their origin or their belonging or lack of belonging to an ethnic, national, racial or religious group" for a statement he made in an April 2003 interview with the daily newspaper Le Monde. The statement read:
- "The day that we no longer have five million Muslims in France but 25 million, they will be the ones giving the orders. And the French will walk close to the walls and step off the pavements with their heads down. If they don't do it, they will be told: 'Why are you looking at me like that? Are you looking for a fight?' And you will have no choice but to leave, otherwise you will get a beating."
On 12 March 2008, the repetition of his statement to the weekly magazine Rivarol (issue of 30 April 2004) led to a further fine of 10,000 euros:
- "When I say that the French will walk along the walls in the presence of 25 million Muslims, the people in the hall answer me, not without reason: 'But Mr Le Pen, that is already the case!'"
Le Pen is stated to have expressed certain skepticism regarding the Holocaust, Holocaust uniqueness, and the politically correct view on the French State, the German World War II military occupation, and has been involved in related legal cases, such as for alleged "Holocaust denial". As a result, he was expelled from the party, now led by his daughter Marine Le Pen, in 2015. He then founded the Comités Jeanne party.
- Millions also perished in the Chinese camps, and there have been terrible genocides in Cambodia and Vietnam. [...] The much greater crimes of the Soviet Gulags occurred over decades and cost millions of lives.
On 22 March 2018, Le Pen joined the Alliance for Peace and Freedom. In October 2021, he endorsed Éric Zemmour for the 2022 French presidential election over his daughter Marine.
Electoral history
Presidential
| Election | First round | Second round | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Votes | % | Position | Result | Votes | % | Position | Result | |
| 1974[4] | 190,921 | 0.7 | 7th | Lost | ||||
| 1988[5] | 4,375,894 | 14.4 | 4th | Lost | ||||
| 1995[6] | 4,570,838 | 15.0 | 4th | Lost | ||||
| 2002[7][8] | 4,804,713 | 16.9 | 2nd | Run-off | 5,525,032 | 17.8 | 2nd | Lost |
| 2007[9] | 3,834,530 | 10.4 | 4th | Lost | ||||
Quotes
- In my speeches, I always condemned communism, National Socialism and fascism.
- I'm always suspicious of people who repent of other people's sins.
- By analogy, if we were to develop a soccer team, then we would not invite basketball and volleyball players to the try outs. We would invite soccer players to apply.
- The result is that you are now experiencing what we experienced in the war in Algeria: The Israeli government says that it is a victim of terrorist activity, but this activity is less visible than the military strikes.
- When two drivers curse each other on the road, and one of them happens to be a Jew, you can't define that as anti-Semitism.
Awards and decorations (excerpt)
- Cross for Military Valour
- The Cross for Military Valour (French: Croix de la Valeur Militaire) is a military decoration of France. It recognizes an individual bestowed a Mention in Dispatches earned for showing valour in presence of an enemy. It was established in 1956 to reward soldiers, sailors, and airmen serving in Algeria who had committed acts of valour or gallantry in combat.
- Combatant's Cross
- Colonial Medal
- Indochina Campaign Commemorative Medal
- North Africa Security and Order Operations Commemorative Medal
- Middle East Operations Commemorative Medal (1956)
See also
External links
- Jean-Marie Le Pen in His Own Words
- Le-Pen’s Notorious ‘Detail’ Remark About World War II
- France's LePen on trial for "justification of war crimes"
References
- ↑ European Dawn newspaper (no.2), published by the Western Goals Institute in London, September 1989, front & page 5.
- ↑ The Mail on Sunday newspaper, London, 8 December 1991
- ↑ The Daily Telegraph, London, 12 April 1997, Peterborough column.
- ↑ Décision n° 74-30 PDR du 7 mai 1974. Conseil constitutionnel.
- ↑ Décision n° 88-56 PDR du 27 avril 1988. Conseil constitutionnel.
- ↑ Décision Déclaration présidentielle premier tour 1995 du 26 avril 1995. Conseil constitutionnel.
- ↑ Décision n° 2002-109 PDR du 24 avril 2002. Conseil constitutionnel.
- ↑ Décision n° 2002-111 PDR du 8 mai 2002. Conseil constitutionnel.
- ↑ Décision n° 2007-139 PDR du 25 avril 2007. Conseil constitutionnel.
