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00:00Jean-Marie Le Pen was always approaching or even crossing political red lines.
00:05But in the early days of his political party, his provocations didn't resonate much.
00:09That all changed in the 1980s, when the National Front broke through electorally.
00:14In 1987, his denial of the Holocaust caused a scandal.
00:30After that shocking statement, an openly anti-Semitic remark.
00:34Le Pen directed an offensive pun at the public service minister,
00:37whose last name translates to oven.
00:44An ugly play on words that resulted in the loss of his European parliamentary immunity.
00:50His anti-Semitism reaffirmed in 2005, when he told a far-right magazine that
00:55the German occupation in France had not been particularly inhumane.
01:00As Le Pen aged, he was no less scandalous.
01:05In June 2014, he attacked artists speaking out against the national rally,
01:09including Jewish singer Patrick Bruel.
01:12And he used the word for batch, as in an oven batch of loaves.
01:18Le Pen's other obsession? The gay community.
01:20As the AIDS epidemic erupted in the 1980s, he proposed forcibly isolating people with AIDS,
01:26and used offensive language to describe victims.
01:30He used homophobic slurs to insult people as well, like in this incident in 1997,
01:43caught on camera in a Paris suburb during a scuffle with opposition activists.
01:48Le Pen was a frequent visitor to courthouses and convicted of several crimes,
02:04including inciting racial violence and justification of war crimes.
02:08And he never expressed regret for his remarks.
02:11On the contrary, in 2015, he repeated his claim that gas chambers were merely a detail of the war.
02:18Jean-Marie Le Pen