Is this the end of the road for Jean-Marie Le Pen, die-hard survivor of the French far-Right?

Jean-Marie Le Pen, who was on Monday night suspended from the Front National, the party he founded, is a veteran political survivor – fending off bruising attempts to dethrone him as king of the French far-Right over the past four decades.

During his long career, he ran the FN like a family firm, ruthlessly cutting out any dissenters.

Today the 86-year-old faces being stripped of his role as honorary president at an extraordinary general assembly to be held within the next three months, but how did he survive so long?

Die-hard survivor

In 1965 he helped run the election campaign of far-Right candidate Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour, and in 1972 he set up the FN.

After having lost an eye in the late 1950s after an electoral fist fight, Mr Le Pen's career could have been cut short in 1976, four years after founding the party, when a bomb destroyed his Paris apartment. He was at another residence at the time. The perpetrator of the attack was never found.

The greatest threat to Mr Le Pen's grip on the far-Right came in 1997 when his heir-apparent, the uncharismatic Bruno Mégret, launched a bid for power in what the FN leader dubbed the great "felony" – the same word Mr Le Pen used on Monday to denounce his daughter's decision to suspend him.

The party split into two factions – one loyal to Mr Le Pen, the other backing Mégret.

Both factions called themselves the National Front, adding a couple of explanatory words to their title.

But a French court later ruled that Mr Le Pen was the only person authorised to use the party name. The exultant firebrand told the rebels to go and "sob into their handkerchiefs".

Rise and fall

In 1984, Mr Le Pen won a seat in the European Parliament and has been constantly re-elected since then.

But in national politics, fortunes waxed and waned hugely. In 1986, the FN won 35 seats in the French National Assembly – the only legislative elections held under proportional representation – but lost practically all of them when the late Socialist president Francois Mitterrand changed the voting rules.

Mr Le Pen ran for president five times in his career. After stunning France in 2002 when he won his way into the second round of the presidential election for the first time, taking almost 17 per cent of the vote. Support dropped in 2007 to just 10.5 per cent, and led him to step aside in favour of his daughter in 2012.

^{Jean-Marie Le Pen with his daughter Marine (Reuters)}

Controversy

Over his long career, Mr Le Pen has turned provocation into an unsavoury art form, repeatedly calling the Nazi gas chambers a "mere detail of history", and more recently suggesting Ebola in Africa could solve Europe's immigration problems.

He has been convicted several times for racism, anti-Semitism and apology of war crimes but for years none of this appeared to dent his grassroots popularity.

Polls suggests this is no longer the case, with the vast majority of FN supporters now seeing him as a political liability.

The self-styled "crocodile" of French politics, you can't always see him under the water, but he's always there, and has previously insisted he would only leave his party "feet first".

That day may have come following his daughter's political parricide, but don't count on Mr Le Pen going quietly. As one party leader told Le Monde, excluding him from the party he founded risks "opening the gates of Hell".