Jean-Marie Le Pen, Rabble-Rousing Leader of French Far Right, Dies at 96

Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founding father of France’s modern political far-right who built a half-century career on rants of barely disguised racism, antisemitism and neo-Nazi propaganda, died on Tuesday in Garches, west of Paris. He was 96.

His death was confirmed on X by Jordan Bardella, the president of the National Front, the party Mr. Le Pen founded. Mr. Le Pen’s family also announced the death, in a hospital, in a statement to Agence-France Presse.

In April 2024, with Mr. Le Pen in frail health after suffering a second heart attack within a year, a French court granted his daughters legal guardianship, giving them the right to make decisions in his name.

An arm-waving reactionary with the swagger of a circus pitchman making outrageous claims, Mr. Le Pen ran unsuccessfully for the French presidency five times, making it to a runoff in 2002, riding waves of discontent and xenophobia and raising specters of a new fascism as he excoriated Jews, Arabs, Muslims and other immigrants — anyone he deemed to be not “pure” French.

Mr. Le Pen’s youngest daughter, Marine Le Pen, succeeded him as leader of the National Front in 2011 and rose to prominence on a tide of populist anger at the political mainstream. She was defeated in France’s presidential elections three times — in 2012, placing third with 17.9 percent of the vote behind François Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy; in 2017, with 33.9 percent, losing to the centrist Emmanuel Macron; and in 2022, with 41.5 percent, defeated again by Mr. Macron.

But that year’s elections also sent a record number of representatives from the party, renamed National Rally, to the lower house of Parliament — 89 in all — testimony to the success of Ms. Le Pen’s efforts to normalize it and moderate its message in some regards.