We construct unconditionally several families of number fields with the largest possible class numbers. They are number fields of degree 4 and 5 whose Galois closures have the Galois group
${{A}_{4}},\,{{S}_{4}}$ , and
${{S}_{5}}$ . We first construct families of number fields with smallest regulators, and by using the strong Artin conjecture and applying the zero density result of Kowalski–Michel, we choose subfamilies of
$L$ -functions that are zero-free close to 1. For these subfamilies, the
$L$ -functions have the extremal value at
$s\,=\,1$ , and by the class number formula, we obtain the extreme class numbers.