French anti-Semitic far-right leader Pierre Sidos dies

Far-right French nationalist Pierre Sidos, who headed an openly anti-Semitic movement that later merged with the anti-immigration National Front party, has died aged 93, a close associate said on Saturday.

He died at the hospital in Normandy surrounded by his loved ones, said Yvan Benedetti, who succeeded him as the head of the Oeuvre Francaise movement.

“France has lost one of its best children and nationalism has lost one of its best soldiers,” Bendetti tweeted.

Sidos was an admirer of France’s wartime leader Philippe Petain, who was later imprisoned for treason.

Sidos’s father was executed in 1946 for collaborating with the Nazis.

In an interview, Sidos famously said: “For me, Adolf Hitler was the German Napoleon and Benito Mussolini, the last of the Caesars.”