Iconic Conservative Political Leader Passes Away At 96

French conservatives mourned the loss of a parochial figure on Tuesday while crediting his daughter with launching a movement that left a deep imprint during the country’s election last year.

Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of France’s National Front party and the father of former presidential candidate Marine Le Pen, died at the age of 96, according to the Daily Mail. Le Pen had been at an assisted living facility for several weeks before passing away on Tuesday “surrounded by his loved ones,” his family said in a statement. Marine Le Pen, Deputy of the French National Assembly and founder of the conservative National Rally party, was not by his side; instead she received the news of her father’s passing while abroad in Kenya on her way back from visiting the cyclone-hit island of Mayotte.

“You will not be able to console me for this sorrow,” the French leader wrote on X. She included a black-and-white picture of herself as a child being carried by her father.

Some of France’s most notable political leaders weighed in with their thoughts and remembrances of Le Pen. “Jean-Marie Le Pen is dead. Enlisted in the uniform of the French army in Indochina and Algeria, orator in the National Assembly and the European Parliament, he always served France, defended its identity and its sovereignty. Today my thoughts are with his family, his loved ones, and of course of (his daughter) Marine whose mourning must be respected,” Jordan Bardella, chair of the National Party, told Reuters. In a statement of its own, the party wrote, “For the National Rally, he will remain the one who, during the storms, held in his hands the small flickering flame of the French Nation and who, through an unlimited will and tenacity, made the national movement an autonomous, powerful and free political family.”

French President Emmanuel Macron stated simply, “A historic figure of the far right, he played a role in the public life of our country for nearly seventy years, which is now a matter for history to judge.” Prime minster François Bayrou, a longtime opponent of Le Pen, laid down his sword at the death of his former adversary. “Beyond the controversies that were his favourite weapon (…), JM Le Pen was a figure of French political life. We knew, by fighting him, what a fighter he was,” his statement read.

RIP to Jean Marie Le Pen… pic.twitter.com/BFUca14PPu

— fleur inverse (@fleur_inverse) January 7, 2025

Le Pen gave voice to the working-class frustrations of France’s blue-collar population following World War II and at times drew condemnations for his minimizing of the Holocaust. Marine Le Pen publicly split with her father in 2015, vowing to block him from participating in any future French election, a strategy observers believed she laid down ahead of a presidential run. “Jean-Marie Le Pen is in a spiral between a scorched-earth strategy and political suicide,” she said at the time, the Washington Post reported. “The NF doesn’t want to be held hostage by his coarse provocations.”

The French government last year was plunged into chaos following its summer elections, and two months later a center-right coalition briefly emerged when Macron tapped conservative politician Michel Barnier to serve as prime minister. However, Barnier was defenestrated in December, Reuters reported, sparking France’s second major political crisis in six month.

Marine Le Pen, who lost the presidential race in 2017 and 2021, albeit by a much smaller margin the second time, is not part of the talks, according to a participant who said both parties on the far right and far left have been excluded. “At the end of this meeting, we all share the same conviction, there will be no government contract with people with whom we do not share the same values,” Laurent Wauquiez, the head of the Republican Right grouping in the National Assembly, told reporters in December.