Jean-Marie Le Pen, born in 1928, is the founder of the far-right National Rally party in France, Le Pen's name has been associated with the party since its founding, and headed it in 1972 before relinquishing his post in 2011 to his daughter Marine Le Pen, who faced current French President Emmanuel Macron in the presidential elections in 2017 and 2022.

Le Pen suffered a mild heart attack on 22 May 2023 and was transferred to a hospital in the Paris area before stabilizing two days later.

Birth and upbringing

Jean-Marie Le Pen was born in 1928 in the department of Morbihan, a small coastal town in Brittany, northwestern France. He was the only son of a modest family of a fisherman's father.

Le Pen acquired an educational model specific to rural France committed to preserving patriotism and glorifying the heroic figures in the country's history, which was considered a distinctive culture of the interwar period.

Study and scientific training

The disappearance of his father during a war accident in the summer of 1942 marked a turning point in the thinking of the young heir to go to the "School of the Third Republic" to hold on to belonging to the "French nation".

After graduating with his baccalaureate in philosophy, Le Pen enrolled in October 1947 at the Faculty of Law in Place Panthéon in Paris and graduated from higher education in political science, mastering rhetoric and rhetoric.

Jean-Marie Le Pen's joining the right-wing Corbo League strengthened his convictions in the fight against communism and charted his political course (Getty Images)

Political experience

Jean became involved in far-right movements during his student life, joining the Corpo Law Students Association and being elected president in 1949, at a time when tensions between right-wing and left-wing students in the Latin Quarter were at their height.

This position was seen as the first step guiding his future career, as well as the political context of the time and the Cold War, which strengthened his convictions of the need to fight communism to ensure "the sustainability of the French nation, which is threatened with extinction."

Le Pen volunteered as a soldier to take part in the 1954 fighting in Indochina, and two years later he was noticed by the politician Pierre Bougadi, who decided to include him in the French Union for the Defense of French merchants and craftsmen.

This union was called "Boujadiya" (after its founder Bojadi) before it became a political party that resisted tax audits, refused to pay taxes by merchants, and defended the rights of simple professions.

Boujadia swept France's political scene and began to unfold its anti-Semitic and xenophobic features until it became a symbol of populism in the country, including 52 deputies elected to the National Assembly in 1956, including Jean-Marie Le Pen as his first term.

Le Pen's joining this party was seen as a golden opportunity to honor his convictions about nationalism and to make the Union of Merchants and Artisans a real mass force that can permanently establish itself in the political arena by making the party the spearhead of the defense of "French Algeria" in parliament.

The dagger found by the son of a tortured Algerian with the inscription "Jean-Marie Le Pen, First Parachute Regiment" (The Vanabulist)

Mysterious past in Algeria

There has been considerable controversy over whether Lieutenant Le Pen, a volunteer in the paratrooper regiment abroad, committed torture while in Algeria for six months in 6.

On November 9, 1962, Le Pen said in an interview with the newspaper Combat, "We practiced torture in Algeria because it was necessary to do so," but later denied what he said, explaining that by "we" he meant the French army and "not me and my comrades."

"There were special and difficult interrogations. We talked about torture, and the French army was returning from Indochina, and there he saw terrible violence beyond imagination and made pulling out nails seem somewhat humane. So, yes, the French army practiced this to obtain information during the Battle of Algiers, but the means it used were the least violent. There were beatings and electric torture, but no mutilation or anything that touched physical integrity."

In 1984, Le Canard Enchaîné wrote that Jean-Marie Le Pen had participated in acts of torture during the Algerian Liberation Revolution in compliance with the military hierarchy imposed at the time.

In 2000 and 2002, the French newspaper Le Monde published a series of testimonies revealing the methods of torture that Le Pen participated in in the first quarter of 1957 in Algeria.

Perhaps most notably, the "Dagger Case", where Mohamed Cherif, the son of an Algerian who was tortured in front of his wife and six children, found a dagger with the inscription "Jean-Marie Le Pen, First Parachute Regiment" (JM Le Pen, 1er REP).

Le Pen's role in confronting the Algerian liberation revolution is still debated to this day between journalists' accusations based on historical facts, the testimonies or statements of historians or even the descendants of the victims, and his continued denial of involvement in any such act.

Decolonization and the return of the extreme right

Since the end of the fifties of the last century, the former "Boujadi" put the issue of preserving the French colonial empire at the heart of his political speeches, considering that the decolonization was the product of global communism that sought to solve the greatness of France.

Jean-Marie Le Pen exploited the Algerian liberation revolution to revive a nationalist political culture that had disappeared since the end of World War II, through his first party, the National Front of Combatants.

After the end of the dream of so-called "French Algeria" in 1962, Le Pen moved from anti-communism to anti-Gaullist (named after the French leader, General Charles de Gaulle), that is, opposition to de Gaulle's France, founded and ruled by an elitist technocrat, which was believed to suppress the country's most modest social classes.

For a decade, when the French far-right was in silence, Le Pen joined Jean-Louis Tixier Vincourt, the far-right candidate for the first presidential election by universal suffrage in December 1965, beginning another dream of bringing far-right movements together under the umbrella of a social, nationalist, and populist party of which he plans to be leader.

Indeed, Jean-Marie Le Pen was able to establish the National Front, together with François Duprrat, with the aim of presenting a united front in favor of the French Renaissance on October 5, 1972.

National Front. New popular force

Jean-Marie Le Pen headed the National Front from 1972 to 2011, during which time he was elected councillor of the municipality of Paris in 1983 and regional councillor in Île-de-France three years later.

During this period, Le Pen made changes to his political discourse and abandoned old colonial concepts to present himself as a "satirical agitator" of immediate social issues, which was then seen as an ideological development that highlighted national interests and an outright rejection of immigration.

Driven by the oil shock of the seventies and the economic crisis, he became famous for his slogan "One million unemployed means one million more immigrants", in an attempt to curb the economic and social scourge of unemployment.

This new far-right political culture earned the leader of the National Assembly his first political success in the 1984 European elections, and he reached the position of member of the European Parliament that allowed his party to exit after a long period of marginalization.

Le Pen has consistently accompanied the xenophobic culture he has espoused since entering politics: in 1996 he said in a video interview: "I believe in racial inequality, and history clearly shows that. They don't have the same ability and level of historical development."

Marine Le Pen announced the robbery of her father Jean of the honorary presidency of the National Rally party because of his statements (Getty Images)

Le Pen. Anti-regime candidate

Le Pen's speeches took a different turn, portraying himself to the French as the anti-regime candidate and rallying around him a large number of traditional extremist voters, convinced that maintaining a strategy of separation from the regime was the right tactic to move up the political ladder.

In 1986, Le Pen returned to the National Assembly with 34 other deputies thanks to a proportional vote, and after his defeat in the 1988 legislative elections, he received 14% of the presidential vote in the elections that same year.

The September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States arguably formed the cornerstone of Le Pen's speeches on national security and far-right ideology, and he used them to support his speeches, after he integrated in France the Islamic religious issue, insecurity and Islamic terrorism, which set the pace for his 2002 and 2007 election campaigns.

Jean-Marie Le Pen created a surprise during the first round of the presidential election on April 21, 2002, where he finished second behind Jacques Chirac with a score of 16.86%, but the 2007 elections confirmed his political decline by only 10.58% in the first round.

In January 2011, he handed over power to his daughter Marine Le Pen, who assumed the presidency of the National Front at the <>th party congress, and later became the honorary president of the movement.

But with the father's and daughter's orientations different, Jean-Marine Le Pen declared that he did not like the "strategy of demonizing" (the party and polishing its image) chosen by his daughter in 2015, as Marin changed the name of her party from the National Front to the National Rally and changed her policies in an attempt to rid the party of the charge of extremism.

Because of an interview by Jean-Marie Le Pen in which he described the gas chambers as "details of the history of World War II" in one interview, Marin announced that his daughter had been stripped of his honorary presidency of the party permanently.

The collapse of the two traditional postwar populist forces, the Communist Party and the Catholic Church, left a huge popular vacuum in the seventies that the National Front quickly filled with its renewed popular slogans to present Jean-Marie Le Pen as "the popular refuge and the only savior of the nation and national interests."