Jean-Marie Le Pen facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Jean-Marie Le Pen
Official portrait, 1994
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
Preceded by	Office established
Succeeded by	Office abolished
President of the National Front
In office 5 October 1972 – 15 January 2011
Preceded by	Party established
Succeeded by	Marine Le Pen
Member of the European Parliament
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 27 March 1992 – 24 February 2000
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
Personal details
Born	(1928-06-20)20 June 1928 La Trinité-sur-Mer, Morbihan, France
Died	7 January 2025(2025-01-07) (aged 96) Garches, Hauts-de-Seine, France
Political party	CJ (from 2016)
Other political affiliations	UDCA (1956–1957) FNC [fr] (1957–1961) CTV (1964–1966) FN (1972–2015) APF (from 2018)
Spouses	Pierrette Lallane ​ ​ (m. 1960; div. 1987)​ Jeanne-Marie Paschos ​ (m. 1991)​
Children	3, including Marie-Caroline and Marine
Relatives	Marion Maréchal (granddaughter)
Alma mater	Panthéon-Assas University
Profession	Lawyer politician activist
Signature
Military service
Allegiance	French Fourth Republic
Branch/service	French Army
Years of service	1953–1955 1956–1957
Rank	First lieutenant
Unit	Foreign Legion 1st Foreign Parachute Regiment
Battles/wars	First Indochina War Suez Crisis Algerian War
Awards	Cross for Military Valour Combatant's Cross Colonial Medal Indochina North Africa Middle East

Jean Louis Marie Le Pen (20 June 1928 – 7 January 2025), commonly known as Jean-Marie Le Pen, was a French far-right politician who served as president of the National Front from 1972 to 2011 and honorary president of the same party from 2011 to 2015.

Le Pen's longevity in politics and his five attempts to become president of France made him a major figure in French political life.

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 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 (1904–1965), was a seamstress and also of local ancestry.

Le Pen was born in La Trinité-sur-Mer on 20 June 1928. 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 Collège Saint-François-Xavier [fr] in Vannes, then at the Lycée Dupuy-de-Lôme [fr] in Lorient.

In November 1944, aged 16, Le Pen 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, 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 ("The anarchist movement in France since 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 UDCA populist party. Le Pen 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 [fr], a veterans' organization. The next year, following his break with Poujade, he was reëlected 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 was that he wore an glass eye.) During the 1950s, Le Pen took a close interest in the Algerian War (1954–62) and the French defence budget.

Elected to parliament under the Poujadist banner, Le Pen voluntarily reëngaged himself for two to three months in the Foreign Legion. He was then sent to Algeria (1957) as an intelligence officer.

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:

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 1962, Le Pen lost his seat in the Assembly. In 1963, he created the Société d'études et de relations publiques [fr] (Serp), 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 (FN) party. He then ran in the 1974 presidential election, obtaining 0.74% of the vote. Le Pen 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 was greatest 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 (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 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 Marius Masse [fr]. 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 (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.

Jean-Marie Le Pen, November 2005

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, 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 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" (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 presidential election and finished fourth. His 2007 campaign, at the age of 78 years and 9 months, made him the oldest candidate for presidential office in French history.

Le Pen was 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 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 (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 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.

In August 2015, Le Pen was expelled from the National Front after a special party congress. He later founded the Comités Jeanne.

Blue, White and Red Rally

Blue, White and Red Rally (French: Rassemblement Bleu Blanc Rouge) is a French nationalist political association founded by Le Pen on 5 September 2015 after his August expulsion from the FN. He told supporters in the city: 'You will not be orphans. We can act in a similar way to the FN, even if we are not part of it.'

Marine Le Pen, the leader of the Front National, remarked, 'He does what he wants, he is a free man.'

He confirmed he would support his granddaughter Marion Maréchal-Le Pen for the next regional elections and that he wanted to influence the National Front's ideology with his association. He also praised Marine Le Pen's speech in Marseille on 6 September 2015, describing it as "lepéniste".

Personal life, wealth, and security

Le Pen with his second wife, Jany Paschos, at the National Front's annual march to the statue of Joan of Arc, Place des Pyramides, Paris, May Day 2007.

Le Pen's marriage to Pierrette Le Pen from 29 June 1960 to 18 March 1987 produced three daughters, who gave 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, in a civil ceremony. Born in 1933, Paschos was previously married to Belgian businessman Jean Garnier. The two married again in a religious marriage in 2021, in a ceremony presided by traditionalist Catholic priest Philippe Laguérie.

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 provided 30 million francs 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 owned a two-storey townhouse on the Rue Hortense in Rueil-Malmaison and another house in his hometown of La Trinité-sur-Mer in Brittany.

Health and death

Le Pen at a signing for his memoirs in 2019

Le Pen was briefly hospitalized after a minor stroke on 2 February 2022. He was hospitalized again on 15 April 2023, after suffering a "mild heart attack", and was discharged from the hospital on 3 May.

In April 2024, Le Pen experienced another heart attack. In November 2024, he was hospitalized for two weeks for medical examinations related to old age, and his family expressed concerns about his general state of health.

Le Pen died on 7 January 2025 at a care facility in Garches, Hauts-de-Seine, at the age of 96. He had been in failing health due to complications from the heart attack he suffered in 2024.

His daughter Marine, who succeeded him at the helm of the National Front party, learned about his death from journalists on a stopover in Nairobi, Kenya, while travelling from Mayotte to Paris. The announcement of her father's death had first been made to Agence France-Presse (AFP) by the Le Pen family.

Electoral record

National Assembly of France

• Member of the National Assembly 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) / 2004–2019.

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.

Decorations

• Cross for Military Valour

Electoral history

Presidential

See also

In Spanish: Jean-Marie Le Pen para niños