When someone as Jean-Marie Le Pen begins the journey to the stokes the fires of Hell as its latest charcoal briquettes the only thing to shed tears for is that it took 96 years.

Jean-Marie Le Pen, the post WWII antisemite politician who founded the fascist French political party National Front after a life of in an attempted to bring those politics into the mainstream in that county the party has died at the age of 96.

According to Reuters, Le Pen’s death on Tuesday was confirmed by his daughter Marine Le Pen who became the President of the National Front after her father stepped down from the leadership of the party he founded in 1972. She served from 2011 until 2022.

The news was met with hundreds taking took in celebrate at Paris’ Place de la République many fire off fireworks, popping champagne, throwing confetti and chanting “We are antifascists!” Celebrations were also seen in other cities across France particularly Lyon, Rennes, Marseille and others.

Born in 1928, Le Pen a crafted legacy of hate and dogma made him a prominent figure for all the wrong reasons in France, whether it was him saying the Nazi gas chambers were during World War II “merely a detail” and that the Nazi occupation of France was “not especially inhumane”.

Le Pen was 1956 was elected to the French National Assembly at the age of 27. One of the things he championed while office was to keep Algeria French, and a soldier in the then French-run territory and was accused of torturing Algerians. Algeria won its independence after a seven year war in 1962. Le Pen lost his seat weeks prior.

In 1965 presidential campaign of a far-right attorney Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour, and during Le Pen called for the rehabilitation of the “Collaborationists,” French citizens allied during World War II, including former French members of the Waffen SS and Nazi Germany ally French State Chief Philippe Pétain who Le Pen should not see his name sullied while Charles de Gaulle, who led the Free French Forces against Nazi Germany and eventually unseated Pétain and took his position, did not see the same fate. “Was General de Gaulle braver than Marshal Pétain in the occupied zone? It is not certain,” he said. “It was much easier to resist in London than to resist in France.” Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour who obtained 5.19% of the votes.

Le Pen ultimately joined with Collaborationists National Front in 1972 along with veterans of France’s failed wars to maintain their colonies in Algeria and what then called Indochina. As the head of the National Front, he ran five times in presidential elections, ending up in a run-off election with the Incumbent Jacques Chirac in 2002 but losing by a landslide. And he was not able to run for office in 1981, having failed to gather the necessary 500.

By this time Le Pen was considered a pariah among much in French. In 2012 millions held rallies against him. Meanwhile Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists rallied around him. Neo-Nazis attempted to counter-march in support for Le Pen In 1999 Gordon Baum, the then leader of the White Supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens, Atlanta businessman Tom Dover, American Renaissance publisher Jared Taylor and members of the C of CC traveled to Paris, France to meet Le Pen at a gathering sponsored by the National Front.

That’s would not only time Le Pen was associated with US fascists. In 2016, Le Pen endorsed his Donald Trump even while Trump was trying to distance himself from one time Klan leader and Republican politician David Duke. Trump retweeted Le Pen’s endorsement.

National Front continued to build in local and in local and regional elections. And as the party grew in the mainstream, right the party’s Nazi leaning became a problem. In 2011, his daughter Marine succeeded him as party chief and she began to the dismantle antisemitic image, replaced it with an Islamophobia one. While he also railed against Muslims, he was like the abandoned also attacking Jews for political expediency. This resulted in friction between Marine and her father who she eventually expel from the party in 2015 because his repeated defense of the Collaborationists and whitewashing of the Holocaust. In 2018 she changed the name of the party to the National Rally which Jean-Marie Le Pen saw this “betrayal” by his daughter’s saying she should marry to lose her family name. Although their relationship remained difficult he was in her corner when Macron defeated her in 2022, continuing the family’s tradition of losing presidential election run-offs her second lost. “She did all she could, she did very well, he said. Opinion polls make her the frontrunner in the next presidential election, due in 2027.

“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,” France President Emmanuel Macron said in a statement.

One post on BlueSky had a more definitive perspective: “When I heard Le Pen was dead, I shrugged. He was 98 years old, and had been more successful than he should ever have been as a Holocaust denier, Nazi sympathizer, and bigot. But a spontaneous celebration that he’s dead? Some folks are STILL on the right side of history.”