French far-right politician and founder of the National Rally party Jean-Marie Le Pen has died aged 96, according to a family statement obtained by the AFP.

He had been in a care facility for several weeks and died at midday on Tuesday “surrounded by his loved ones,” his family said in a statement.

A former paratrooper, Le Pen led the far-right party then known as the National Front from 1972 to 2011, before his daughter Marine took over as party chief in 2011. She has since rebranded the party as National Rally.

Le Pen stood for president five times, reaching the election-run off against Jacques Chirac in 2002 in a result that shocked France. Chirac however won by a large margin with more than 82% of votes.

Throughout his career, he courted controversy and was fined repeatedly for his comments on the Holocaust, which he described as a “mere detail” of history, as well as his praises of the Nazi-collaborating French wartime government of Vichy.

Le Pen was a former member of the French Foreign Legion’s parachute regiment and took part in the war in Indochina and in the Algerian war of independence, during which he was accused of torturing detainees.

In 1962, he admitted to the newspaper Combat that he had “nothing to hide," about the Algerian war. "We tortured because it had to be done. When you’ve caught someone who’s just planted 20 bombs that could explode from one minute to the next and he doesn’t want to talk, you have to use exceptional methods to make him do so.”

However, he later denied accusations of torture, claiming that they were part of a left-wing plot to discredit him.