Le Pen was born on 20 June 1928 in La Trinité-sur-Mer, a small seaside village in Brittany, the son of Anne Marie Hervé and Jean Le Pen, a fisherman. He was orphaned as an adolescent (Ward of the Nation, brought up by the state), when his father's boat "La Persévérance" was blown up by a mine in 1942. He was raised as a Roman Catholic and studied at the Jesuit high school François Xavier in Vannes, then at the "lycée" of Lorient.