Over 1,000 attended the mass for the polarizing political figure, including his daughter Marine Le Pen, now the leading far-right figure in France.

More than 1,000 people attended a memorial ceremony on Thursday in central Paris for the founder of France’s main far-right party, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who died earlier in January aged 96. The “mass for the repose of the soul” at Notre-Dame du Val-de-Grace church took place under tight security,

His death was as controversial as his life. Last 14 November, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the 96-year-old Front National founder, who’d been taken to a West Paris hospital after collapsing (since 2022 he’d had several small strokes),

Jean-Marie Le Pen, father of Marine Le Pen and the defining figure of France’s postwar far-right movement, has died at the age of 96, according to French network BFMTV.

Retrospectives on Jean-Marie Le Pen highlight his most infamous racist and antisemitic statements but almost uniformly overlook a key dimension of his politics: anti-communism. Yet this has long been a decisive focus for the far right,

Jean-Marie Le Pen, who died Tuesday 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.

Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of France’s far-right party Front National, has died. He was 96. His family confirmed the news in a statement sent to the AFP and said he died “surrounded by his loved ones.”

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