About 200 people, including his daughter Marine Le Pen, attended the funeral, which lasted about two hours.
After the ceremony at the church, Marine Le Pen, her family members and close friends of the former far-right leader, who died on Tuesday at the age of 96, escorted the coffin to the cemetery, a few hundred meters away.
Jean-Marie Le Pen was buried in a tomb next to his parents, reports Hina.
Le Pen co-founded the National Front, which later became the National Gathering (RN), and led it from its founding in 1972 until 2011, when he retired from political life. The party was then taken over by his daughter Marine Le Pen and was its leader until 2022.
RN president Jordan Bardella was also present at the send-off but stayed away from the cameras, several sources said.
The ceremony was guarded by strong security forces so that there would be no incidents. On Friday, the prefect banned protests in that municipality.
On Tuesday night, several hundred of Le Pen’s opponents gathered in several French cities, including Paris, Lyon and Rennes, to celebrate his death. “That filthy racist is dead,” read one banner in Paris.
The National Assembly strongly condemned it, as did the French government. “Dead, even an enemy is entitled to respect,” said a government spokeswoman.
An extreme rightist who was a mixture of populism, eloquence and charisma, obsessed with immigration and Jews, he pulled the French far right from the margins.
A provocative and fiery speaker, Le Pen shocked the political class and much of the public on April 21, 2002 by entering the second round of the presidential election behind outgoing President Jacques Chirac, who was eventually elected.
Le Pen fought in Indochina and Algeria.
He died on Tuesday in the Paris region at the facility where he was admitted a few weeks ago.
The Elysée Palace announced after his death that Le Pen was a “historic figure of the extreme right” in France whose “role in public life … now belongs to the court of history.”
A second religious honoring ceremony will be held on January 16 at Paris’s Notre-Dame-du Val-de-Grâce church and will be open to the public.
(Vijesti.ba)
