SAINT-CLOUD, France — He is still the “Devil of the Republic,” as his nickname would have it, a national politician who haunts the French imagination like no other.

The proof: Jean-Marie Le Pen’s newly published memoir is a big best seller, even though the patriarch of France’s far right never came close to attaining high office, is nearly 90, and has been pushed out of the National Front by his own daughter Marine nearly 50 years after he founded the party.

His unrepentant extremism — on race, World War II, the Holocaust, gender, torture, immigrants — led Ms. Le Pen to kick him out. Those views can still shock and titillate, and his compatriots are lapping them up.

“The migration phenomenon,” Mr. Le Pen began, in an interview at the gloomy old mansion in the Paris suburbs he inherited years ago from a wealthy acolyte, “is a tsunami.” He added grimly, “They have a fertility rate three times ours.”