>Jean-Marie Le Pen founded France's far right in the 1970s and mounted a strong challenge for the presidency. But it was only when he handed the reins on to his daughter that his rebranded party caught sight of power. >He has died aged 96, his family has said. >Le Pen's supporters saw him as a charismatic champion of the every man, unafraid to speak out on hard topics. >And for several decades he was seen as France's most controversial political figure. His critics denounced him as a far-right bigot and the courts convicted him several times for his radical remarks. >**A Holocaust denier and an unrepentant extremist on race, gender and immigration**, he devoted his political career to pushing himself and his views into the French political mainstream. >The so-called Devil of the Republic came runner-up in the 2002 French presidential election, but he was resoundingly defeated. That devil had to be taken out of the National Front if it was going to progress further - a process that became known as "de-demonisation". >For his part, the five-time presidential candidate - who started his political life fighting Communists and conservatives alike - described himself as "ni droite, ni gauche, français" - not right, not left, but French. >And all the French had their opinions about Le Pen. In 2015, Marine Le Pen expelled her father from the National Front he had founded four decades previously. >"Maybe by getting rid of me she wanted to make some kind of gesture to the establishment," he would later tell the BBC's Hugh Schofield. >"But think how much better she would be doing if she had not excluded me from the party!" . . [Source](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c84z7pl4193o)