Jean-Marie Le Pen obituary: French far-right politician dead at 96

Yet, despite those convictions and his eventual political estrangement, the nativist ideas that propelled his decades of popularity – encapsulated in slogans such as “French People First” – remain ascendant in today’s France, across Europe and beyond.

Mr Le Pen, who once reached the second round of the 2002 presidential election, was eventually estranged from his daughter, Marine Le Pen.

She renamed his National Front party, kicked him out and transformed it into one of France’s most powerful political forces while distancing herself from her father’s extremist image.

A fixture for decades in French politics, the fiery Jean-Marie Le Pen was a wily political strategist and gifted orator who used his charisma to captivate crowds with his anti-immigration message.

The portly, silver-haired son of a Breton fisherman viewed himself as a man with a mission – to keep France French under the banner of the National Front. Picking Joan of Arc as the party’s patron saint, he made Islam, and Muslim immigrants, his primary target, blaming them for the economic and social woes of France.

A former paratrooper and Foreign Legionnaire who fought in Indochina and Algeria, he led sympathisers into political and ideological battles with a panache that became a signature of his career.

He had recently been exempted from prosecution on health grounds from a high-profile trial over his party’s suspected embezzlement of European Parliament funds that opened in September. He had 11 prior convictions, including for violence against a public official and antisemitic hate speech.

Le Pen was notably convicted in 1990 for a radio remark made three years earlier in which he referred to the Nazi gas chambers as a “detail in World War II history”.

He also was convicted for a 1988 remark linking in a play on words a Cabinet minister with the Nazi crematory ovens, and for a 1989 comment blaming the “Jewish international” for helping seed “this anti-national spirit”.

In another setback, Le Pen lost his European Parliament seat in 2002 for a year for assaulting a Socialist politician during a 1997 election campaign.

He is survived by his wife and three daughters.