JEAN-MARIE LE PEN
Name: Jean-Marie Le Pen
Born: 20 June 1928 La Trinité-sur-Mer, France
Jean-Marie Le Pen (born June 20, 1928, La Trinité-sur-Mer, France) is a French
far-right nationalist politician, founder and president of the Front National (National
Front) party.
Le Pen has run for the French presidency five times, including in 2002, when in
a surprise upset he came second, polling more votes in the first round than the
main left candidate, Lionel Jospin. Le Pen lost in the second round to Jacques
Chirac. Le Pen again ran in the 2007 French presidential election and finished
fourth. His 2007 campaign, at the age of 78, makes him the oldest candidate for
presidential office in France.
Le Pen focuses on immigration to France, the European Union, traditional culture,
law and order and France's high rate of unemployment. He advocates immigration
restrictions, the death penalty, raising incentives for homemakers,
compulsory national service, and euroscepticism. He has been charged with
Holocaust denial several times, and has successfully sued his accusers.
Le Pen was born in a small seaside village in Brittany, the son of a fisherman.
He was raised as a Roman Catholic, but then orphaned as an adolescent (pupille
de la nation, brought up by the state), when his father's boat was blown up by a
mine in 1942. He studied at the Jesuit high school François Xavier in Vannes,
then in the lycée of Lorient.
Aged 16, he was turned down (because of his age) by Colonel Henri de La
Vaissière (then representant of the Communist Youth) when he attempted, in
November 1944, to join the French Forces of the Interior (FFI). He then
entered the faculty of law in Paris, and started to sell in the street the
monarchist Action française 's newspaper, Aspects de la France (Action
Française monarchist movement newspaper). He was repeatedly convicted of assault
(coups et blessures). 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 a congress of the UNEF student union and having
insulted, while drunk, an abbot.
After having received his law diploma, he enlisted in the Army in the Foreign
Legion in Indochina, where he arrived after the 1954 Dien Bien Phu Battle (lost
by France, and which prompted the President of the Council Pierre Mendès France
to put an end to the war at the Geneva Conference). He was then sent to Suez (1956),
but arrived only after the cease-fire. He was then sent to Algeria (1957) as
an intelligence officer. He has been accused of having engaged in torture, but
he denied it, although he recognized having known of its use. After his time
in the military, he studied political science and law at Paris II. His graduate
thesis, submitted in 1971 by Jean-Marie Le Pen and Jean-Loup Vincent, was titled
Le courant anarchiste en France depuis 1945 or "The anarchist movement in France
since 1945".
His marriage (June 29, 1960 - March 18, 1987) to Pierrette Lalanne resulted in
three daughters; their daughters have given him nine granddaughters. Their break-up
was somewhat dramatic, with his ex-wife posing nude in the French edition of
Playboy to ridicule him. Marie-Caroline, another of his daughters, would also
break with Le Pen, following her husband to join Bruno Mégret, who split from
the FN to found MNR, the rival Mouvement National Républicain (National
Republican Movement). The youngest of Le Pen's daughters, Marine Le Pen, is a
senior member of the Front National.
In 1977 Le Pen inherited a fortune from Hubert Lambert, son of the cement
industrialist of the same name. Hubert Lambert was a political supporter of Le
Pen, as well as being a monarchist, an alcoholic, and in poor health. Lambert's
will provide 30 million francs (approximatively 5 million euros) to LePen, as
well as his castle in Montretout, Saint-Cloud (the same castle had been owned by
Madame de Pompadour until 1748).
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.
On May 31, 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.
National advertisement in Marseille, predicting the now unrealised possibility
of Jean-Marie Le Pen becoming President in 2007
Le Pen started his political career as the head of the student union in Toulouse.
In 1953, a year after 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, 28 years old, was the youngest member of
the Assembly.
In 1957, he became the General Secretary of the Front National des Combattants (National
Front of Combatants), a veteran's organization, as well as the first French
politician to nominate a Muslim candidate, Ahmed Djebbour, an Algerian, who was
elected in 1957 as deputy of Paris. The next year, following his break with
Poujade, Le Pen was re-elected 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 however 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 that he wears a glass eye is untrue).
During the 1950s, Le Pen took a close interest in the Algerian war (1954-62) and
the French defense budget.
Le Pen then 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:
"Was General de Gaulle more brave than the Marshall Pétain in the occupied zone?
This isn't sure. It was much easier to resist in London than to resist in France."
During the 1961 Barricades Week in Algiers, Le Pen called for the barricades to
be extended to Paris, and was afterward put in custody. The following year,
he lost his seat at the Assembly. He created the Serp (Société d’études et de
relations publiques) firm, a company involved in the music industry, which
produced both chorals of the CGT trade-union or songs of the Popular Front and
Nazi marches. The firm was condemned in 1968 for "praise of war crime and
complicity" after the diffusion of songs from the Third Reich.
In 1972, Le Pen founded the Front National (FN) party, along with former OAS
member Jacques Bompard, former Collaborationist Roland Gaucher and others
nostalgics of Vichy France, neo-nazi pagans, Catholic fundamentalists, etc.
Le Pen presented himself for the first time in the 1974 presidential election,
obtaining 0.74%. In 1976, his Parisian flat (he lived at that time in his
castle of Montretout in Saint-Cloud) was dynamited. The affair never was
elucidated. Le Pen then didn't manage to obtain the 500 signatures from "grand
electors" (grands électeurs, mayors, etc.) necessary to present himself to 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 votes in the 1980s, starting in the municipal elections of 1983.
His popularity has been greatest in the south of France. The FN obtained 10
percent at the 1984 European elections. 34 FN deputies entered the Assembly
after the 1986 elections, which were won by the right wing, bringing Jacques
Chirac to Matignon in the first cohabitation (that is, of the combination of a
right-wing Prime minister, Chirac, with a socialist President, Mitterrand).
In 1984 and 1999, Le Pen won a seat in the European Parliament. In 1988 he lost
a reelection bid for the Parliament of France in the 8th District of Bouches-du-Rhône.
He was defeated in the second round by Socialist Marius Masse. In 1992 and
1998 he was elected to the regional council of Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur.
In 1997, the European Parliament stripped Le Pen of his parliamentary immunity
so that he could be tried by a German court for comments he made at a December
1996 press conference before the German Republikaner party. Le Pen stated there
that: "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." ; Le Pen had made a similar statement in France in 1987, which
also caused him to be condemned in virtue of the Gayssot Act on negationism. 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. He was deprived of his seat by the European Court of Justice
on April 10, 2003 for physically assaulting another candidate.
Le Pen ran in the French presidential elections in 1974, 1988, 1995, 2002 and
2007. He did not 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 percent 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 Socialist 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
extremist views had qualified for the second round of the French presidential
elections. There was a widespread stirring of national public opinion, and more
than one million people in France took part in street rallies, slogans such as "vote
for the crook, not the fascist" were heard in an expression of fierce opposition
to Le Pen's ideas.
Le Pen was then soundly defeated in the second round, when incumbent president
Jacques Chirac obtained 82 percent 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. Le Pen complained of a government plot
to prevent him from running. Some argue that this event was merely a scheme of
Le Pen's to avoid defeat in the election.
In recent years, Le Pen has tried to soften his image, with mixed success. He
has maneuvered his daughter Marine into a prominent position, a move that
angered many inside the National Front, who worry about the emergence of a
possible Le Pen family dynasty.
Name: Jean-Marie Le Pen
Born: 20 June 1928 La Trinité-sur-Mer, France
Jean-Marie Le Pen (born June 20, 1928, La Trinité-sur-Mer, France) is a French
far-right nationalist politician, founder and president of the Front National (National
Front) party.
Le Pen has run for the French presidency five times, including in 2002, when in
a surprise upset he came second, polling more votes in the first round than the
main left candidate, Lionel Jospin. Le Pen lost in the second round to Jacques
Chirac. Le Pen again ran in the 2007 French presidential election and finished
fourth. His 2007 campaign, at the age of 78, makes him the oldest candidate for
presidential office in France.
Le Pen focuses on immigration to France, the European Union, traditional culture,
law and order and France's high rate of unemployment. He advocates immigration
restrictions, the death penalty, raising incentives for homemakers,
compulsory national service, and euroscepticism. He has been charged with
Holocaust denial several times, and has successfully sued his accusers.
Le Pen was born in a small seaside village in Brittany, the son of a fisherman.
He was raised as a Roman Catholic, but then orphaned as an adolescent (pupille
de la nation, brought up by the state), when his father's boat was blown up by a
mine in 1942. He studied at the Jesuit high school François Xavier in Vannes,
then in the lycée of Lorient.
Aged 16, he was turned down (because of his age) by Colonel Henri de La
Vaissière (then representant of the Communist Youth) when he attempted, in
November 1944, to join the French Forces of the Interior (FFI). He then
entered the faculty of law in Paris, and started to sell in the street the
monarchist Action française 's newspaper, Aspects de la France (Action
Française monarchist movement newspaper). He was repeatedly convicted of assault
(coups et blessures). 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 a congress of the UNEF student union and having
insulted, while drunk, an abbot.
After having received his law diploma, he enlisted in the Army in the Foreign
Legion in Indochina, where he arrived after the 1954 Dien Bien Phu Battle (lost
by France, and which prompted the President of the Council Pierre Mendès France
to put an end to the war at the Geneva Conference). He was then sent to Suez (1956),
but arrived only after the cease-fire. He was then sent to Algeria (1957) as
an intelligence officer. He has been accused of having engaged in torture, but
he denied it, although he recognized having known of its use. After his time
in the military, he studied political science and law at Paris II. His graduate
thesis, submitted in 1971 by Jean-Marie Le Pen and Jean-Loup Vincent, was titled
Le courant anarchiste en France depuis 1945 or "The anarchist movement in France
since 1945".
His marriage (June 29, 1960 - March 18, 1987) to Pierrette Lalanne resulted in
three daughters; their daughters have given him nine granddaughters. Their break-up
was somewhat dramatic, with his ex-wife posing nude in the French edition of
Playboy to ridicule him. Marie-Caroline, another of his daughters, would also
break with Le Pen, following her husband to join Bruno Mégret, who split from
the FN to found MNR, the rival Mouvement National Républicain (National
Republican Movement). The youngest of Le Pen's daughters, Marine Le Pen, is a
senior member of the Front National.
In 1977 Le Pen inherited a fortune from Hubert Lambert, son of the cement
industrialist of the same name. Hubert Lambert was a political supporter of Le
Pen, as well as being a monarchist, an alcoholic, and in poor health. Lambert's
will provide 30 million francs (approximatively 5 million euros) to LePen, as
well as his castle in Montretout, Saint-Cloud (the same castle had been owned by
Madame de Pompadour until 1748).
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.
On May 31, 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.
National advertisement in Marseille, predicting the now unrealised possibility
of Jean-Marie Le Pen becoming President in 2007
Le Pen started his political career as the head of the student union in Toulouse.
In 1953, a year after 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, 28 years old, was the youngest member of
the Assembly.
In 1957, he became the General Secretary of the Front National des Combattants (National
Front of Combatants), a veteran's organization, as well as the first French
politician to nominate a Muslim candidate, Ahmed Djebbour, an Algerian, who was
elected in 1957 as deputy of Paris. The next year, following his break with
Poujade, Le Pen was re-elected 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 however 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 that he wears a glass eye is untrue).
During the 1950s, Le Pen took a close interest in the Algerian war (1954-62) and
the French defense budget.
Le Pen then 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:
"Was General de Gaulle more brave than the Marshall Pétain in the occupied zone?
This isn't sure. It was much easier to resist in London than to resist in France."
During the 1961 Barricades Week in Algiers, Le Pen called for the barricades to
be extended to Paris, and was afterward put in custody. The following year,
he lost his seat at the Assembly. He created the Serp (Société d’études et de
relations publiques) firm, a company involved in the music industry, which
produced both chorals of the CGT trade-union or songs of the Popular Front and
Nazi marches. The firm was condemned in 1968 for "praise of war crime and
complicity" after the diffusion of songs from the Third Reich.
In 1972, Le Pen founded the Front National (FN) party, along with former OAS
member Jacques Bompard, former Collaborationist Roland Gaucher and others
nostalgics of Vichy France, neo-nazi pagans, Catholic fundamentalists, etc.
Le Pen presented himself for the first time in the 1974 presidential election,
obtaining 0.74%. In 1976, his Parisian flat (he lived at that time in his
castle of Montretout in Saint-Cloud) was dynamited. The affair never was
elucidated. Le Pen then didn't manage to obtain the 500 signatures from "grand
electors" (grands électeurs, mayors, etc.) necessary to present himself to 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 votes in the 1980s, starting in the municipal elections of 1983.
His popularity has been greatest in the south of France. The FN obtained 10
percent at the 1984 European elections. 34 FN deputies entered the Assembly
after the 1986 elections, which were won by the right wing, bringing Jacques
Chirac to Matignon in the first cohabitation (that is, of the combination of a
right-wing Prime minister, Chirac, with a socialist President, Mitterrand).
In 1984 and 1999, Le Pen won a seat in the European Parliament. In 1988 he lost
a reelection bid for the Parliament of France in the 8th District of Bouches-du-Rhône.
He was defeated in the second round by Socialist Marius Masse. In 1992 and
1998 he was elected to the regional council of Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur.
In 1997, the European Parliament stripped Le Pen of his parliamentary immunity
so that he could be tried by a German court for comments he made at a December
1996 press conference before the German Republikaner party. Le Pen stated there
that: "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." ; Le Pen had made a similar statement in France in 1987, which
also caused him to be condemned in virtue of the Gayssot Act on negationism. 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. He was deprived of his seat by the European Court of Justice
on April 10, 2003 for physically assaulting another candidate.
Le Pen ran in the French presidential elections in 1974, 1988, 1995, 2002 and
2007. He did not 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 percent 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 Socialist 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
extremist views had qualified for the second round of the French presidential
elections. There was a widespread stirring of national public opinion, and more
than one million people in France took part in street rallies, slogans such as "vote
for the crook, not the fascist" were heard in an expression of fierce opposition
to Le Pen's ideas.
Le Pen was then soundly defeated in the second round, when incumbent president
Jacques Chirac obtained 82 percent 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. Le Pen complained of a government plot
to prevent him from running. Some argue that this event was merely a scheme of
Le Pen's to avoid defeat in the election.
In recent years, Le Pen has tried to soften his image, with mixed success. He
has maneuvered his daughter Marine into a prominent position, a move that
angered many inside the National Front, who worry about the emergence of a
possible Le Pen family dynasty.