People react during a gathering at Place de la République after it was announced that far-right politician Jean Marie Le Pen had died on January 07, 2025 in Paris, France. The poster reads, “Rest in Hell Facho (fascist).”
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The co-founder of France’s main postwar far-right movement Jean-Marie Le Pen divided the country even beyond the grave on Wednesday, with the government slamming street celebrations that took place in some French cities after his death.

Le Pen, co-founder of the National Front (FN) died on Tuesday (January 7, 2025) aged 96, leaving a legacy which the French presidency said would be judged by history. The right praised his contribution to politics but the left hailed the demonstrations and branded him a “fascist” who was openly racist and anti-Semitic.

In the hours after his death, hundreds of people took to the streets in several cities in France to celebrate his demise, singing, letting off fireworks and toasting with champagne.

Jubilant opponents of Le Pen cheered as they gathered in Place de la Republique in central Paris for what they dubbed an “apero geant” (giant aperitif), brandishing placards including “the dirty racist is dead” and “a beautiful day”.

“Nothing, absolutely nothing justifies dancing on a corpse. The death of a man, even if he is a political opponent, should inspire only restraint and dignity,” Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau wrote on X.

“These scenes of jubilation are simply shameful,” he added.

Defence Minister Sebastien Lecornu told Europe 1 radio: “The political struggle is for the living, so we must continue with the living but respect the dead. It is a question of dignity.”

‘Enemy of the Republic’

Government spokesperson Sophie Primas said the “dead” had the right to “respect” even though Le Pen made “completely unacceptable remarks” and “acted in sometimes unacceptable ways”.

In the southeastern city of Lyon, seven people were arrested after rubbish bins were burned and projectiles thrown at the police during a rally called by the hard-left and attended by some 600 people.

Police said three people were arrested at the Paris rally that gathered 650 people.

But the parliamentary whip of the hard-left France Unbowed (LFI), Mathilde Panot, said the demonstrations echoed the “spirit of Charlie”.

Le Pen’s death coincided with the 10th anniversary of the massacre at the Charlie Hebdo satirical newspaper by Islamist attackers that led to well-attended street marches in defence of freedom of expression.

The far-right-winger was an “enemy of the Republic”, Ms. Panot told RTL radio.

‘Must not lead to blindness’

Socialist MP Jerome Guedj told Public Senat TV that while “I find it wrong to rejoice at the death of a man, I also find it wrong to sugarcoat his career”.

In a tribute on X, French Prime Minister Francois Bayrou said Le Pen was a “fighter” and a “figure of French political life”, a comment that enraged the hard-left.

“Jean-Marie Le Pen was not just ‘a figure of French political life’ as Francois Bayrou said. Respect for the deceased must not lead to blindness to his career,” said the leader of the LFI’s MPs in the European Parliament, Manon Aubry, describing Le Pen as “a notorious racist and anti-Semite”.

“Jean-Marie Le Pen may be well and truly dead, but he is still here,” commented the Le Monde daily, describing him as a “Trumpian character before his time” in reference to the U.S. president-elect.

A family funeral for Le Pen is to be held on Saturday in his hometown of La Trinite-sur-Mer in Brittany.

His political mantle was taken by his daughter Marine but she moved emphatically to distance the movement from the legacy of her father, renaming the party the National Rally (RN) and expelling him from the party as part of a process dubbed “dediabolisation” (de-demonisation) to make it electable.

In her first public reaction, Marine Le Pen on Wednesday (January 8, 2025) called her father a “warrior”, adding that “many” people were mourning him.

Marine Le Pen had been returning from a visit to the cyclone-ravaged French Indian Ocean island of Mayotte when news broke of her father’s death.

The RN’s deputy leader Louis Aliot confirmed reports that she had learned of the death of her father from reporters travelling with her.

“We were on the plane in Nairobi where we made a technical stopover,” and it was in the Kenyan capital “that journalists who were on the flight informed us of the death”, he told TF1 television channel.

Jean-Marie Le Pen, who died Tuesday (January 7, 2025) aged 96, was the far-right bogeyman of French politics, infamously dismissing the Holocaust as a detail of history and spending half a century whipping up anger over immigration.

The co-founder of the far-right National Front – later renamed the National Rally – was eventually booted out of the party by his daughter Marine Le Pen for anti-Semitism.

A former paratrooper, Le Pen sent shock waves through France in 2002 when he made it to the second round of the presidential election, which was won by Jacques Chirac.

Le Pen, who seemed more at ease in the role of provocateur than would-be president, appeared as surprised as everyone else by his spectacular breakthrough.

Years later, he boasted that the rise of the far right around Europe showed his ideas had gone mainstream.

Born in the port of La Trinite-sur-Mer in the western Brittany region on June 20, 1928, he was the son of a seamstress and a fisherman.

His father’s fishing boat hit a mine during World War II, killing him – a loss that hit the young Le Pen hard.

Colonial war junkie

Anxious to see action, Le Pen volunteered for service in two wars in French colonies – the First Indochina War (1946-1954) in Vietnam, and then in Algeria (1954-1962).

Shortly after his return from Algeria he entered politics and became France’s youngest MP at 27 when he was elected to parliament in 1956.

But he was unable to resist the lure of the battlefield.

Later that year, he took part in the Franco-British military expedition to seize the Suez Canal, and a few years later joined forces fighting to keep Algeria French.

As in Vietnam, he was infuriated to see France losing its colonial possessions, accusing World War II hero Charles de Gaulle of “helping make France small” by granting Algeria its independence.

A consummate orator and trained lawyer, he tapped into the anger of right-wingers nostalgic for the empire and French settlers forced to flee the North African country.

The eye patch he wore for many years added to his pugilistic air.

Years later Le Pen revealed that he lost his eye driving a tent peg into a hole, and not, as was widely thought, in a brawl.

Apartment bombed

In 1972, he co-founded the National Front (FN), billed as a “national, social and popular” party, and two years later made his first run for president.

The early years were tumultuous, with his unabashed racism and anti-Semitism striking a raw nerve in a country still haunted by the collaborationist Vichy regime during World War II.

In 1976, a bomb ripped through the Paris apartment building where Le Pen lived with his wife Pierrette and three daughters, slightly injuring six people but sparing the Le Pens.

Eight years later, Pierrette walked out of the marriage, resurfacing shortly afterwards to pose nearly nude for Playboy magazine in a French maid’s outfit – her pointed answer to her husband’s advice to get a job as a cleaner.

The FN’s first big electoral breakthrough came in the mid-1980s, when the party won 35 seats in parliament.

But its fortunes fluctuated sharply over the next two decades, partly a result of changes in the election system that favoured big parties.

Le Pen’s message remained unchanged, however, with immigration, the political elite and the European Union all taking a bashing – even though he himself was a member of the European Parliament for over 30 years.

In 2007, Le Pen maintained that Nicolas Sarkozy, the son of a Hungarian immigrant who went on to win the presidency, was not sufficiently French to hold the office.

He repeatedly warned that African immigration would “submerge” the country and claimed the Nazi occupation of the northern half of France in World War II was “not particularly inhumane”.

But it was comments on the Holocaust – which he repeatedly called a “detail” of history – that caused the most shock.

The remark earned the politician nicknamed the “Devil of the Republic” and one in a string of convictions for anti-Semitism and racism.

It also drove a wedge between him and his daughter Ms. Marine, who embarked on a mission to clean up the FN’s image after taking over the party leadership in 2011.

She called the process “de-diabolisation” – “de-demonisation” – in an apparent nod to the legacy left by her father.

What’s in a name?

Fours years of uneasy political cohabitation between father and daughter ended in a blazing row in 2015, when the younger Le Pen kicked him out of the party for his Holocaust remarks.

The ultimate humiliation for Le Pen senior came when Ms. Marine ditched the National Front brand in early 2018.

“She would have to commit suicide to cut her links with me,” he had told the Journal du Dimanche newspaper.

Further ignominy was in store for him, however.

His adored granddaughter, Marion Marechal-Le Pen, a telegenic former MP tipped as a future leader of the far right, also distanced herself from the family brand.

She dropped Le Pen from her name on her social media accounts, becoming simply Marion Marechal.

“Marion perhaps thinks that it is too much of weight to carry,” her grandfather grumbled.

His former party, now the National Rally, has since made significant inroads in both European and French politics under Ms. Marine.

It showed strong gains in this year’s European Parliament elections and became the largest single party in a subsequent general election in France.