After months of false rumors of his demise, Jean-Marie Le Pen died on Tuesday, January 7th 2025, aged 96.
It had been several years since the former MP and founder of the Front National left French politics, where he had entered with a bang by being elected as one of France’s youngest MPs in 1956. The final acts of his career took place in 2015, when he was ousted from the Front National, the party he founded in 1972 and handed over to his daughter in 2011, and in 2019, when his last term as member of the European Parliament ended.
Le Pen’s death leaves a void in French political life, both for his detractors and for his most loyal supporters. Le Pen was known as “the Menhir” in French politics—a reference to a large, upright monolith, usually of prehistoric origin. And while supporters admired his staunch, monolithic defense of his positions, ‘prehistoric’ is emblematic of how detractors viewed him and his political positions.
While daughter Marine Le Pen’s increasingly popular Rassemblement National today has distanced itself from some of her father’s opinions, after expelling him from the party following his attempts to downplay the Holocaust and defend the collaborationist Vichy regime, themes brought to the forefront by the elder Le Pen have become important in present day France—and Europe.
Le Pen is gone but when the web is buzzing with the rape gang scandal in the UK and France is commemorating ten years of surrender to Islamism since the Charlie Hebdo massacre, issues broached by him continue to be consequential. Today, political debate in France is structured around themes he helped raise: identity, immigration and crime.
