Jean-Marie Le Pen facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Jean-Marie Le Pen
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Le Pen in 2007
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| Honorary President of the National Front | |
| In office 16 January 2011 – 20 August 2015 |
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| President | Marine Le Pen |
| Preceded by | Office established |
| Succeeded by | Office abolished |
| President of the National Front | |
| In office 5 October 1972 – 15 January 2011 |
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| Preceded by | Party established |
| Succeeded by | Marine Le Pen |
| Member of the European Parliament | |
| In office 1 July 2004 – 1 July 2019 |
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| Constituency | South-East France |
| In office 24 July 1984 – 10 April 2003 |
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| Constituency | France |
| Member of the National Assembly | |
| In office 2 April 1986 – 14 May 1988 |
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| Constituency | Seine |
| In office 9 December 1958 – 9 October 1962 |
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| Preceded by | Constituency established |
| Succeeded by | René Capitant |
| Constituency | Seine's 1st |
| In office 19 January 1956 – 5 December 1958 |
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| Constituency | Seine's 3rd |
| Regional Councillor | |
| In office 26 March 2010 – 13 December 2015 |
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| Constituency | Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur |
| In office 27 March 1992 – 24 February 2000 |
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| Constituency | Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur |
| In office 21 March 1986 – 22 March 1992 |
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| Constituency | Île-de-France |
| Municipal Councillor of Paris | |
| In office 13 March 1983 – 19 March 1989 |
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| Constituency | 20th arrondissement |
| Personal details | |
| Born | 20 June 1928 La Trinité-sur-Mer, Brittany, France |
| Political party | Jeanne Committees (2016–present) |
| Other political affiliations |
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| Spouses |
Pierrette Lallane
(m. 1960; div. 1987)Jeanne-Marie Paschos
(m. 1991) |
| Children | 3, including Marine |
| Relatives | Marion Maréchal (granddaughter) |
| Alma mater | Panthéon-Assas University |
| Profession |
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| Signature |  |
| Military service | |
| Allegiance | French Fourth Republic |
| Branch/service | French Army |
| Years of service |
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| Rank | 1st Lieutenant |
| Unit |
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| Battles/wars | |
| Awards |
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Jean Louis Marie Le Pen (French pronunciation: [ʒɑ̃ maʁi lə pɛn]; born 20 June 1928) is a French far-right politician who served as President of the National Front from 1972 to 2011. He also served as Honorary President of the National Front from 2011 to 2015.
Le Pen graduated from the faculty of law in Paris in 1949. After his time in the military, he studied political science and law at Panthéon-Assas University.
Le Pen focuses 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 "lepénisation of minds" due to its noticeable effect on mainstream political opinion. His controversial speeches and his integration into public life have made him a figure who polarizes opinion, considered the "Devil of the Republic" among his opponents or the "last samurai in politics" among his supporters. He has been convicted for statements downplaying the Holocaust, and fined for incitement to discrimination regarding remarks made about Muslims in France.
His longevity in politics and his five attempts to become President of France have made him a major figure in French political life. His unexpected progress to the second round in the 2002 presidential election—where he would lose in a landslide to incumbent Jacques Chirac—left its mark on French public life, and the "21st of April" is now a frequently used expression in France. A former Member of the European Parliament (MEP), Le Pen served as the Honorary President of the National Front from 2011 to 2015. He was expelled from the party by his daughter Marine in 2015, after new controversial statements.
Contents
Life and career
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 L'Association des Ancients Combattants and Councilor of La Trinité-sur-Mer. Jean-Marie Le Pen's mother, Anne-Marie Hervé (1904–1965) was a seamstress and also of local ancestry.
Le Pen was born on 20 June 1928 in La Trinité-sur-Mer, a small seaside village in Brittany, the son of Anne Marie Hervé and Jean Le Pen, a fisherman. 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 high school François Xavier in Vannes, then at the lycée of Lorient.
In November 1944, aged 16, he 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's newspaper, Aspects de la France, in the street. He was repeatedly convicted of assault and battery (coups et blessures).
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" (communists). He was excluded from this organisation in 1951.
After his time in the military, he 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 or ("The anarchist movement in France since 1945").
Military service
After receiving his law degree, he enlisted in the Foreign Legion. He arrived in Indochina after the 1954 battle of Dien Bien Phu, which had been lost by France and which prompted French Prime Minister Pierre Mendès France to put an end to the Indochina war at the Geneva Conference. Le Pen was then sent to 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 UDCA populist party. Le Pen has often presented himself as the youngest member of the Assembly, but a young communist, André Chène, 27 years old and half a year younger, was elected in the same year.
In 1957, Le Pen became the General Secretary of the National Front of Combatants, a veterans' organization, as well as the first French politician to nominate a Muslim candidate, Ahmed Djebbour, an Algerian, elected in 1957 as deputy of Paris. 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 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. (Popular belief is that he wears a glass eye.) During the 1950s, Le Pen took a close interest in the Algerian War (1954–62) and the French defence budget.
Elected deputy of the French Parliament under the Poujadist banner, Le Pen voluntarily reengaged himself for two to three months in the French Foreign Legion. He was then sent to Algeria (1957) as an intelligence officer.
Far-right politics
Le Pen directed the 1965 presidential campaign of far-right candidate Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour, who obtained 5.19% of the votes. He insisted on the rehabilitation of the Collaborationists, declaring that:
In 1962, Le Pen lost his seat in the Assembly. He created the Serp (Société d'études et de relations publiques) firm, a company involved in the music industry, which 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. Le Pen then failed to obtain the 500 signatures from "grand electors" (grands électeurs, mayors, etc.) necessary to present himself in the 1981 presidential election, won by the candidate of the Socialist Party (PS), François Mitterrand.
Criticizing 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 has been greatest in the south and east of France. The FN obtained 16 seats in the 1984 European elections. A total of 35 FN deputies entered the Assembly after the 1986 elections (the only legislative elections held under proportional representation), which were won by the right wing, bringing Jacques Chirac to Matignon in the first cohabitation government (that is, the combination of a right-wing Prime minister, Chirac, with a socialist President, Mitterrand). In Paris, Jean-Marie Le Pen was elected to the National Assembly.
In 1984, Le Pen won a seat in the European Parliament and has been consistently reelected since then. In 1988 he lost his reelection bid for the French National Assembly in the Bouches-du-Rhône's 8th constituency. He was defeated in the second round by Socialist Marius Masse. In 1991 Le Pen's invite 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 French presidential elections in 1974, 1988, 1995, 2002, and 2007. As noted above, he was not able to run for office in 1981, having 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. This was enough to qualify him for the second round, as a result of the poor showing by the PS candidate and incumbent prime minister Lionel Jospin and the scattering of votes among 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 the French presidential elections. 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, when incumbent president Jacques 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 French presidential election and finished fourth. His 2007 campaign, at the age of 78 years and 9 months, makes him the oldest candidate for presidential office in French history.
Le Pen has been 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 used against the supporters of the NO vote. Ireland finally refused to ratify the treaty. Ireland is the only EU country which had 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 has since 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 against 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 describing the gas chambers, used in concentration camps during the Holocaust, as a "detail" of history. A French court decided in June to cancel this 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 favor 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 has since founded the Comités Jeanne.
Personal life, wealth, and security
Le Pen's marriage to Pierrette Le Pen from 29 June 1960 to 18 March 1987 resulted in three daughters, who have given him eight grandchildren. Marie-Caroline, one of his daughters, broke with Le Pen, following her husband to join Bruno Mégret, who split from the FN to found the rival Mouvement National Républicain (MNR, National Republican Movement). The youngest of Le Pen's daughters, Marine Le Pen, is leader of the National Rally. On 31 May 1991, Jean-Marie Le Pen married Jeanne-Marie Paschos ("Jany"), of Greek descent. Born in 1933, Paschos was previously married to Belgian businessman Jean Garnier.
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. Lambert's will provide 30 million francs (approximately €5 million) to Le Pen, as well as his opulent three-storey 11-room mansion at 8 Parc de Montretout, Saint-Cloud, in the western suburbs of Paris. The home had been built by Napoleon III for his chief of staff Jean-François Mocquard. With his wife, he also owns a two-story townhouse on the Rue Hortense in Rueil-Malmaison and another house in his hometown of La Trinité-sur-Mer.
In the early 1980s, Le Pen's personal security was assured by KO International Company, a subsidiary of VHP Security, a private security firm, and an alleged front organisation for SAC, the Service d'Action Civique (Civic Action Service), a Gaullist organisation. SAC allegedly employed figures with organized crime backgrounds and from the far-right movement.
Le Pen was briefly hospitalized after a minor stroke on 2 February 2022.
Le Pen was hospitalized on 15 April 2023, after suffering a “mild heart attack” and was discharged from the hospital on 3 May.
Electoral record
National Assembly of France
- Member of the National Assembly of France for Paris: 1956–1962 / 1986–1988. Elected in 1956, reelected in 1958, 1986.
- President of the National Front political grouping: 1986–1988.
Municipal Council
- Municipal councillor for the 20th arrondissement of Paris: 1983–1989.
European Parliament
- Member of European Parliament: 1984–2003 (Sentenced by the courts in 2003) / Since 2004. Elected in 1984, reelected in 1989, 1994, 1999, 2004, 2009, 2014.
Regional Council
- Regional councillor of Île-de-France : 1986–1992.
- Regional councillor of Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur: 1992–2000 (sentenced by the courts in 2000) / Since 2010–2015. Reelected in 1998, 2010.
Issues and policy positions
- See also National Rally for more information of Le Pen's views.
Death penalty
Le Pen supports bringing back the death penalty in France.
Controversial statements
Le Pen has been accused and convicted several times at home and abroad of xenophobia and antisemitism. A Paris court found in February 2005 that his verbal criticisms, such as remarks disparaging Muslims in a 2003 Le Monde interview, were "inciting racial hatred", and he was fined €10,000 and ordered to pay an additional €5,000 in damages to the Ligue des droits de l'homme (League for Human Rights). The conviction and fines were upheld by the Court of Cassation in 2006.
- In May 1987, he advocated the forced isolation from society of all people infected with HIV, by placing them in a special "sidatorium". "Sidaïque" is Le Pen's pejorative solecism for "person infected with AIDS" (the more usual French term is "séropositif" (seropositive)) The term "sidatorium" was coined by François Bachelot.
- On 21 June 1995, he attacked singer Patrick Bruel, who is of Algerian Jewish descent, on his policy of no longer singing in the city of Toulon because the city had just elected a mayor from the National Front. Le Pen said, "the city of Toulon will then have to get along without the vocalisations of singer Benguigui". Benguigui, an Algerian name, is Bruel's birth name.
- In February 1997, Le Pen accused Chirac of being "on the payroll of Jewish organizations, and particularly of the B'nai B'rith"
- Le Pen once made the infamous pun "Durafour-crématoire" ("four crématoire" meaning "crematory oven") about then-minister Michel Durafour, who had said in public a few days before, "One must exterminate the National Front".
- On many occasions, before and after the FIFA World Cup, he claimed that the French World Cup squad contained too many non-white players, and was not an accurate reflection of French society. He went on to scold players for not singing La Marseillaise, saying they were not "French".
- In the 2007 election campaign, he referred to fellow-candidate Nicolas Sarkozy, who is of partial Greek Jewish and Hungarian descent, as "foreign" or "the foreigner."
- In a 2014 video on the National Front's website, Le Pen reacted to criticism of him by Jewish singer Patrick Bruel with "next time we'll do a whole oven batch!" Le Pen later claimed the comments he made had no anti-Semitic connotations "except for my political enemies or imbeciles".
Prosecution concerning Holocaust denial
Le Pen has made several provocative statements concerning the Holocaust which have been interpreted by the legal system as constituting Holocaust denial. He has been convicted of racism or inciting racial hatred at least six times. He was eventually condemned under the Gayssot Act to pay 1.2 million francs (€183,200).
In 1997, the European Parliament, of which Le Pen was then a member, removed his parliamentary immunity so that Le Pen could be tried by a German court in Germany, for comments he made at a December 1996 press conference before the German Republikaner party. Echoing his 1987 remarks in France, Le Pen stated: "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." In June 1999, a Munich court found this statement to be "minimizing the Holocaust, which caused the deaths of six million Jews," and convicted and fined Le Pen for his remarks. Le Pen retorted sarcastically: "I understand now that it's the Second World War which is a detail of the history of the gas chambers."
Decorations
- Officer of the French Foreign Legion
- Cross for Military Valour
- Croix du combattant
- Colonial Medal
- Indochina Campaign commemorative medal
- North Africa Security and Order Operations Commemorative Medal
- Middle-East operations commemorative medal
Electoral history
Presidential
| Election | First round | Second round | ||||||
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| Votes | % | Position | Result | Votes | % | Position | Result | |
| 1974 | 190,921 | 0.7 | (#7) | Lost | ||||
| 1988 | 4,375,894 | 14.4 | (#4) | Lost | ||||
| 1995 | 4,570,838 | 15.0 | (#4) | Lost | ||||
| 2002 | 4,804,713 | 16.9 | (#2) | Run-off | 5,525,032 | 17.8 | (#2) | Lost |
| 2007 | 3,834,530 | 10.4 | (#4) | Lost | ||||
See also
In Spanish: Jean-Marie Le Pen para niños
- Politics of France
- History of far-right movements in France
