For years, France’s main far-right party has tried to distance itself from a long trail of inflammatory and derogatory comments by Jean-Marie Le Pen, its founding president.

His daughter, who took over the leadership of the party in 2011. kicked him out. It changed the namefrom the National Front to the National Assembly. And the party – which was led for a long time by Mr. Le Pen, who called Hitler’s gas chambers a “detail” of history, strongly condemned anti-Semitism.

But when Mr Le Pen died on Tuesday at the age of 96, the party drew him deeply into its fold, its leaders celebrating him as a visionary, a “great patriot” and a “brave and talented politician”.

“He will remain the one who in the storms held in his hands the small flickering flame of the French nation,” said the National Assembly. in the statementadding that his “will and unwavering persistence” shaped the party into an “independent, powerful and free” force.

There was nothing in the statement to indicate disagreement with Mr Le Pen’s views or his scathing remarks. At best, he was said to be “unruly and sometimes turbulent”, often prone to controversy.

Jean-Yves Camus, an expert on the far right at the Jean-Jaurès Foundation, said the strategy of Marine Le Pen, Mr. Le Pen’s daughter and successor, “has always been to stand out without fully considering” her father’s unsavory legacy. It was too early to say whether he would do so now, he said.

“Honorable old age took a warrior but gave us back a father,” said Ms. Le Pen, who is no longer party president but remains a top lawmaker and a leading force in the party. he said in a brief tribute on Wednesday. “Death brought him back.”

So far, it seems that the party has not embarked on the path of deep introspection. Instead, said Mr. Camus, it seems, is trying to “reinsert” a new version of Mr. Le Pen into the French collective memory, safe in the knowledge that there will be no more of his racist or anti-Semitic outbursts.

But Renaud Labaye, secretary general of the National Assembly in the lower house of parliament, said the party had already assessed Mr Le Pen’s background.

“It was his exclusion – an act that was even more strengthened by the fact that it was initiated by his daughter and that he is the founder of the party – that underlined that his excesses and objections in the party are strongly condemned,” said Mr. .said Labaye.

For decades, Mr. Le Pen was a pariah in French politics, considered so repulsive that many opponents refused to debate him. This had a lot to do with the party’s history: among its founders in 1972 were former Nazi soldiers, collaborators with the wartime Vichy regime and former members of a group that carried out deadly attacks meant to thwart Algeria’s struggle to free itself from French colonial rule.

Mr Le Pen’s openly racist, anti-Semitic and anti-gay comments cemented the public’s perception of the party.

Mr. Le Pen, who was in the paratroopers in two colonial wars to suppress independence movements in Vietnam and Algeria, once said that races “do not have the same capabilities, nor the same level of historical evolution,” and he has repeatedly been convicted for anti-Semitic comments and public downplaying of the Holocaust. He once compared homosexuality to pedophilia.

In 2002, after Mr. Le Pen surprised many by making it to the second round of the presidential election, left-wing parties urged their members to vote for his conservative opponent, Jacques Chirac. This was the most famous use of a strategy known in French politics as the “republican front”, which has since been used repeatedly to stop the far right from taking power.

In those elections in 2002, Mr. Le Pen won less than 18 percent of the vote. But when his daughter took over, she began what became known as a strategy of “non-demonization,” clean up the party’s image and broaden its appeal.

She distanced herself from her father’s anti-Semitic statements, declaring the concentration camps “the height of barbarism.” She expelled her father from the party in 2015, when he was its honorary president, and said his repeated Holocaust denial showed “his aim is to harm” the party. Three years later she renamed it.

Now the National Assembly – after riding successive waves of fear and anger over uncontrolled immigration, soaring inflation and deadly terrorism – is no longer on the fringes of French politics, and some of its policies are more widely accepted.

Last summer, during early elections, another republican front between left and centrist parties prevented the victory of the extreme right. Still, a record 124 National Assembly MPs now sit in the powerful lower house of parliament, making it the largest single opposition party.

Although Ms. Le Pen has softened some of the party’s initial hardline stances, her core focus on identity and desire to change the French Constitution to limit the rights of foreigners mark her in France as a far-right party, according to experts. Party members argue, for example, that the French should have priority even over legal migrants in areas such as certain social benefits and subsidized housing. This is contrary to the French constitution and republican ideals, established during the revolution of 1789, which make all men equal, said Mr. Camus.

Many experts characterized Ms. Le Pen’s “non-demonization” campaign as mere marketing, and in last summer’s election, many candidates of the National Assembly were punished because of past racist or anti-Semitic remarks.

Some analysts said the party had no choice but to acknowledge Mr Le Pen’s integral role in building its long-running, stable and successful movement, which is still dominated by his family.

But the party’s glowing memory of Mr. Le Pen was also a way of reshaping his image — and its own, some experts said.

“Honoring Le Pen further ‘de-demonizes’ the party” by portraying him as an exaggerated but thoughtful politician, unfairly condemned for warning about the dangers of immigration, said Nicolas Lebourg, a historian who specializes in the far right.

“People who voted for the first time last year hardly even remember him,” said Mr. Lebourg.

Tributes, from the party and others, are also proof that the ideas of Mr. Le Pen – like drastically stopping immigration – increasingly part of the mainstream.

“The importance that Jean-Marie Le Pen has had in our political life is the result of many years of denial and impotence on the issue of migration,” wrote François-Xavier Bellamy, leader in the European Parliament of the main conservative Republican Party, which historically despised Mr Le Pen and was thrown into turmoil last year when its leader at the time advocated an alliance with the National Assembly.

“Those who insult him even in death refuse to look first at their failures,” Mr Bellamy said.

In an interview with The New York Times in 2018. Le Pen assessed his own influence: “My ideas have progressed, even in the programs of my opponents,” he said. “That’s why my fight was not without value.”

However, even in death, he retains many political enemies, especially on the left. Crowds of hundreds gathered in several cities across France to celebrate his death on Tuesday night.

“No, he was not a ‘great servant of France'” wrote Manuel Bompard, national coordinator for far-left party France Unbowed. “He was an enemy of the Republic.”

AND Mélanie Vogel, a senator from the Green Party, said on X: “His ideas, the danger they represent for our democracies, are very much alive. Let us finally defeat his successors.”

Mr. Le Pen’s long life and political career spanned the entire post-war French history. Even the Elysée Palace, the home and office of the French president, who fought to keep the extreme right out of power, admitted this, emphasizing in a statement that Mr. Le Pen ran for president five times, his seven terms as a member of the European Parliament and his roles as a municipal and regional councilor.

“The historical figure of the extreme right,” the statement said, “has played a role in the public life of our country for almost 70 years, which is now a matter of history for the court.”

Ségolène Le Stradic contributed reporting.