frontman of the french ultra-nationalist populist National Front. Le Pen was born a fisherman's son in Brittany in 1928. He joined the French Foreign Legion in 1954 and as a paratrooper faced violent combat in Indochina (Vietnam) and Algeria, a North African nation ruled all or in part by France since 1830.

When Le Pen arrived, Algeria was regarded not as a colony but as a District of France itself and home famed French author Albert Camus. But radicals had plunged Algeria into bloody, dirty terrorist warfare that, by the time France granted it independence on July 3, 1962, cost more than 250,000 French and Algerian lives.

Le Pen emerged from such combat as a fiercely passionate French nationalist with little love for foreigners, especially Arabs or Muslims. In France he became a zealous supporter of ultra-nationalist candidates, formed the National Front Party during the 1960s to advance such views, and adopted the motto of World War II's Nazi-collaborating Vichy regime (which Le Pen has always refused to condemn): 'Work, Family, Fatherland.'Le Pen, in more than half a dozen runs as a presidential candidate, mined a dark subterranean vein of racism and resentment.'In a book of 1,000 pages on the Second World War,' Le Pen once infamously said, 'the gas chambers take up 10 to 15 inches. That is a detail.'But in 2002 Le Pen had refocused his softened message – 'I am not a racist. I am a Francophile'– onto targets that found widespread popular resonance – crime, immigration, and the loss of French sovereignty and independence to a unified European government ruled from Brussels. he came in second in the first round of 2002's elections, but didn't make it through the second round.

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