By BRUCE CRUMLEY/Paris

Denunciations of Jean-Marie Le Pen and his xenophobic National Front (FN) as racist, anti-Semitic and hostile to minorities and foreigners aren't exactly new. More novel, however, are such condemnations coming from far-right movements like the Austrian Freedom Party (FPO), which itself won international opprobrium in 1999 after entering government on a populist platform similar to Le Pen's. "No comparisons between the FPO and FN are possible," bristled Freedom Party general secretary Peter Sichrovsky last week in a clear attempt to distance his party from the fractious Frenchman. "No links, no political contacts exist."

Achieving the status of untouchable among fellow right-wing extremists is no small feat, but offending even the most unsavory types with messages of intolerance, exclusion, racist provocation — don't forget intimidation and violence — has become a trademark of Le Pen's nearly 50 years in politics. He's become the candidate of resentment and despair. In his crusade to lay blame on the ever-convenient "other" for the supposed loss of French values and grandeur, Le Pen has consistently sought out the angry, slighted and disillusioned voter aching to make somebody pay. Initially that attracted only a quasi-fascist fringe of French society deluded by the notion that immigrants, "sociocommunists," Jews and corrupt politicians were the cause of national ruin. Increasingly, however, Le Pen's antiestablishment, outsider rhetoric has become a lightning rod for protest among disgruntled voters right, left and center.

Those sentiments not only explain the Le Pen vote, but they also pretty much sum up Le Pen. Born in 1928 to a fisherman in the Breton village of La-Trinité-sur-Mer, Le Pen was raised — as he recalled in last week's first-round victory speech — in "hunger, cold, and poverty." Things got even starker in 1942 when his father died at sea. LePenist lore holds that the family trawler, Persévérance, sunk after striking a German mine, but conflicting accounts assert it was laid by anti-Nazi forces. Mythology also permeates the tale of Le Pen's loss of an eye during a 1958 political brawl — an actual altercation that injured his left eye, though the one he lost to cataracts was his right. Similarly, Breton Resistance fighters do not recall Le Pen's purported membership in the underground, but his postwar combat as a reactionary student in Paris street fights was duly noted by police.

In 1954 Le Pen put his violent streak to professional use — touching down in Indochina as a paratrooper after French defeat there was already sealed. In 1957 he served in French Algeria battling indigenous forces waging a guerrilla war for independence. Unsubstantiated claims, including some made by his first wife Pierrette, have Le Pen torturing Algerians during the war — allegations he has repeatedly denied. Less debatable were the betrayal and fury Le Pen experienced over the surrender of l'Algérie Française by Paris politicians. Other outraged right-wing nationalists in the armed forces and among the thousands of repatriated colonists became Le Pen's initial base of political backers.

Between his two military stints, Le Pen launched a political career, and at 27 he became France's youngest legislator with his 1956 election to Parliament, representing a reactionary movement of small-business owners. Le Pen quit the movement and Parliament later that year — accusing its leaders of being too moderate and unwilling to seize power. Though active in extreme-right politics throughout the 1960s, Le Pen went into business in 1963 by founding a record company specializing in military speeches and music. Its sale of Nazi-era material earned Le Pen a conviction for trivializing war crimes.

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