Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, of the far right Front National (FN) party, sits at her desk by an open window with a view through the leaves of a plane tree onto a small square below. There is a faint smell of cigarettes in the room and I think that, like so many young women in France, Marion is probably a smoker.

Dressed in black pants and fitted jacket over a crisp, white shirt with a small gold chain at her throat, Marion talks fast and fluently, though perhaps a little too much and too eagerly – like a student who has done her homework and wants you to know it.

Here she is on globalisation: “A form of protectionism should be enforced at national level, at least on strategic areas such as agriculture.”

And on membership of the European Union: “Choosing Europe is suicidal, even more so with intra- as well as extra-Europe competition.”

On social policy: “French people should be prioritised; clandestine immigrants get 100 per cent refund on healthcare while two-thirds of French people can’t afford medical help. Charity begins at home.”

How did she vote in today’s debate on same-sex marriage? The FN is radically opposed, she says: “It is not homophobia; it is because [same-sex marriage] opens the door to adoption. Love is important but not always enough. I think it is egotistical for people to knowingly deprive a child of having both a mother and a father just because they want a child.”

What about single-parent families? “Generally it’s a way for homosexuals to adopt.”

Would she like to have children herself? “Well,” she smiles, “I need to find my soul mate first. The life of a female politician makes it hard to combine personal life and work, but I think it is almost a patriotic duty to have children.”

Marion belongs to a political dynasty. Her grandfather is Jean-Marie Le Pen, the 84-year-old father of France’s extreme right: founder of the Front National, bruiser, patriot and, in the eyes of the country’s bien pensant middle classes, devil incarnate. Marion’s aunt is Marine Le Pen, who at 44, after doing the hard yards in municipal politics, was elected – some might say anointed – president of the FN when her father retired in 2010 and is an MEP in the European Parliament. In the first round of the 2012 presidential elections, Marine won almost a fifth of the vote behind Nicolas Sarkozy and Francois Hollande. The same year, her niece Marion became a deputy (MP) in the National Assembly, at 22 the youngest in the history of the republic.

Thanks to Marine and Marion, the FN has increased its support among women and young people – 30 per cent of 18- to 24-year-olds voted for Marine in the presidential elections – and Marion says she is proud to represent patriotic youth: “Being so young is an asset, people see it as a kind of purity – it’s hard to imagine someone as young as me being corrupted already!”

Marion Maréchal-Le Pen’s parliamentary seat is Carpentras, in the Vaucluse region of the rural south. A bus takes me from the former papal seat of Avignon, past the stout city walls and past several posters of Marine Le Pen’s face bearing the legend, “Oui, la France”.

Carpentras was once a thriving market town surrounded by fertile fields and orchards. “It was known as the bread basket of France,” local hotel manager Frédéric Van Orshoven tells me. “Then the trucks came from Spain, straight up the new motorway to Paris, and Carpentras began to collapse.”

Thirty years ago the region imported labour from North Africa – Tunisians and Moroccans, known as Magrebs – to work in the fields and processing plants.

“We needed them,” explains Van Orshoven. “But now the next generation are unemployed, hanging about in gangs, dealing drugs. Their women wear the veil [frowned on in aggressively secular France] and we have two mosques, one of them fundamentalist.”

Can the town’s new deputy do anything useful? He shrugs: “What can she do – throw them away? They are French after all.” In the market the next morning I find two elderly woman gossiping: what do they think of Marion?

“She is very pretty, very agreeable, always smiling, but what she proposes is impossible,” says one, prodding me gently in the chest. “Return France to the French? It is too late for that. There are Magreb women here of my age, they have children and grandchildren.”

In a playground in one of the squares, two well-dressed women, mother and daughter, are watching a toddler on the swings. “This Le Pen girl is parachuted in,” says one. “You can see why people voted for her.” She nods meaningfully towards a young woman wearing a niqab. A Senegalese woman in a colourful turban tells me: “Patriotism is good, I love my own country, but sometimes it feels dangerous to be from somewhere else.”

I walk out of town to the brand new FN office where Marion holds her weekly meetings with constituents. Builders are hammering and drilling while she sits at an enormous table in an otherwise empty room, listening to problems. One woman explains she is worried for her children’s safety because of gangs of older boys roaming the streets and torching cars, seemingly out of reach of the police and courts.

Marion is sympathetic and attentive; she doesn’t have any ready solutions but the woman relaxes, feeling listened to. It’s an impressive and, I think, genuine performance from the 23-year-old.

As I leave them still chatting and smiling, I study the posters in the foyer: several of Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marion’s grandfather, in his younger days, looking generally virile and heroic – one of him holding Marion as an angelic, curly headed baby – and more of her aunt Marine during her presidential campaign.

While the junior member of the family has made a good debut and Le Pen père trades on past glories, there is little doubt that Marine is the big hitter just now.

These two women – blonde, statuesque Marine with something of her father’s physicality, and Marion, slim and strikingly pretty with long,
fair hair – are the new faces of the far right.

Both are intent on what Marine has termed the de-demonisation of the party, carefully distancing themselves from some of Jean-Marie’s more notorious rhetoric – xenophobic, anti-Semitic, homophobic – and from the thuggish, skinhead elements in the party. One member, captured on film giving a Nazi salute, was summarily dismissed by Marine.

Instead, they have appeared to modernise without abandoning a right-wing discourse: not pro-abortion but pro a woman’s right to choose; not anti-gay but against gay marriage; not overtly racist but in favour of draconian curbs on immigration. When Marion used her one chance, as a new deputy, to speak in the full Assembly, she chose to protest at the influx to French cities of poverty-stricken Romanians and Bulgarians – known colloquially as “les Roms” – and was applauded by the House.

And the current dire economic downturn has played to the party’s strengths: themes of anti-globalisation, protectionism and immigration control resonating with communities struggling with 10 per cent unemployment and the loss of traditional blue-collar jobs.

Marion grew up in the family house with her siblings and cousins and is close to Jean-Marie. “Though he always had a busy schedule, he is not the classic grandfather sitting with the grandchildren on his lap,” she says.

Practically everyone in the Le Pen family, including spouses and partners, are paid-up party members and yet Marion insists they came to their political views independently. “We don’t talk about politics around the dinner table; there was no brainwashing. My grandparents’ passion for France was conveyed, naturally, but the FN wasn’t the obvious route for me at first.”

In fact, Marion flirted with Sarkozy’s centre-right Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) party before joining the FN. “I didn’t support him as such,” she says, “But his character seduced me and I thought, ‘Why not?’ He galvanised people and he was a lawyer, not from high administration, so it was a change from other politicians. My interest drifted, though, when I saw discordance between his words and actions: he aligned too much with the United States; he disappointed people on fiscal matters, competition, sovereignty and especially on security. There was more immigration under Sarkozy than under Jospin!” (Socialist Lionel Jospin was prime minister of France from 1997 to 2002.)

Yet for all her talk of independence, the widespread and sometimes violent antipathy towards Jean-Marie’s political extremism created a siege mentality within the family. Marion’s mother and aunts were children when the family apartment was bombed by anti-FN activists, and they had a hard time from pupils and staff at the state schools chosen for them by Jean-Marie. “He told them, ‘You will have to face the knocks as they will last your whole life,’ ” explains Marion. She, too, was sent to a state school but changed to the private system after experiencing similar discrimination: “Because my name, Le Pen, is heavily charged, it unleashed a lot of passion.”

Yet she chose to keep the name, along with her father’s, Maréchal. “Yes, because despite the discrimination I’m very proud of the Le Pen name. It is part of my political heritage.”

Though Marine is now leader of the FN, Jean-Marie’s staff still refer to him as “Monsieur le President”. In the leafy confines of the family home in the Paris suburb of Saint-Cloud at least, JM is still clearly le grand fromage. During my afternoon with him, he confided that Marion was at first reluctant to stand for election to the Assembly. “She said, ‘But grandpapa, I have my law exams.’ I told her, ‘How can we expect young people to be involved in politics if we don’t set the example?’ So she won her election and straight afterwards she passed her exams!”

Today, Marine Le Pen is on the cover of the weekly news and current affairs magazine L’Express, her head thrown back, laughing, and underneath in large type, two words: “Elle monte!” Inside, five pages analysing the rise and rise of “the devil’s daughter”, and how she has brought the FN in from the cold, from outside the pale into mainstream French politics.

In the 2012 presidential election, Marine stole centre-right voters from Nicolas Sarkozy, pushing him into second place behind Francois Hollande. The Socialist Party leader went on to win the presidency but has made a sad fist of it, losing popularity at a cracking pace. A recent poll concluded that in a straight race between Hollande and Le Pen, Marine would win. Another poll revealed that 65 per cent of French people think Marine is “courageous”.

How did the woman who is, as several political commentators have warned, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, gain so much credibility?

“Her feminine softness makes what was aggressive in the father relatively admissible in the daughter,” says Pascal Perrineau, professor at Paris’s elite Institute for Political Studies. Commenting ahead of the 2012 presidential race, Alain Duhamel of the left-wing Libération newspaper went further: “She is, unfortunately, a very intelligent woman: combative, highly polished … extremely sure of herself and her intuitions and gifted with an incomparable aplomb. She is, in fact, far more dangerous than her father ever was.”

Last month, the European Parliament voted to strip Marine Le Pen of diplomatic immunity, leaving the way clear for French authorities
to prosecute her for inciting racial hatred by comparing Muslim prayers in the street to the Nazi occupation of France.

At a 2010 rally in Lyon, she told party members, “For those who like to talk about World War II, to talk about occupation, we could talk about, for once, the occupation of our territory. There are no armoured vehicles, no soldiers, but it is an occupation all the same and it weighs on people.”

After the overwhelming vote against her, an unrepentant Le Pen attacked her fellow MEPs for violating her right to freedom of expression.

Earlier this year, on a blustery spring day in England, knots of protesters were assembling outside the Cambridge University Union, unfurling banners in readiness for the arrival of Marine Le Pen. “No to racism, fascism and Islamaphobia” read one, “No Nazis here. Stop Le Pen” another.

The ancient university’s debating chamber prides itself on inviting controversial speakers to address members. A placard reading, “Union, you [heart sign] rapists and fascists”, referred both to Le Pen and to the recent visit of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, former head of the International Monetary Fund, accused of raping a chambermaid in a New York hotel.

By the time Marine Le Pen’s black BMW swings into the street at the rear of the Union building, the crowd has swelled to several hundred and police lines are in position. She could have been smuggled in via a secret underground passage but chooses instead to walk to the entrance in full view of protestors, as her father had done 10 years earlier.

A queue of ticket holders snakes around the building waiting to be frisked by security. I ask a third-year law student why he has come. “She got 20 per cent of the [presidential] vote,” he says, “so she’s obviously a force in French life and I think we should hear what she has to say. Nazis didn’t come to power because people listened to them – rather because people didn’t listen.”

Every seat in the chamber is taken, there are overflow rooms packed with people and as reporters squeeze onto a bench in the upper gallery Le Pen makes her entrance, wearing tailored pants and a black jacket over a low-cut blouse.

Using her hands for emphasis, blonde bob swinging, she is straight into familiar themes: the “re-armament” of France to reclaim sovereignty from a domineering eurocracy, the need for market regulation, the “poison” of mass immigration, the “insult” of women in burqas and Muslim prayers in the streets of France, and the 21st-century “totalitarianisms” of globalisation and Islam.

By the time she and I sit down together in a room upstairs, she has talked for an hour, faced a battery of universally hostile questions and her deep, powerful voice is croaking a little. Her minder tells me we can have only 10 minutes. So, we must rattle through some questions.

Why did she come?

Because, she says, the Front National has been caricatured, mainly in the minds of the elite: “If I can show them our true face, what we really stand for, then it is worthwhile coming here.” Her party is conflated with the extreme right National Front in Britain, she says, when actually it is closer to the eurosceptic UK Independence Party (UKIP).

She would like to reduce immigration to France to 10,000 a year from its current level of 250,000. How?

She would put a stop to family reunions and cut back on the right to asylum, “which has been heavily abused”. She sees no reason to welcome nationals from former French colonies: “Having won their independence, why should they be allowed in the country of their former colonial masters?”

Who would she let in?

She would allow a small number of “really deserving people” seeking asylum from persecution, otherwise only those whose skills and
talents could contribute something to France.

If she were in power, what would she do for working women with families?

She would increase child-care provision but also offer a “parent salary” to those who choose to stay home to raise children.
Why does she continue to reside in the Le Pen family home?

“We all have heavy work schedules and this way we can keep the family links going strong. And my mother is kept very busy caring for her grandchildren; I couldn’t do all I do without her.”

When I ask about her niece, Marion, her face softens visibly: “She is really like my own daughter,” she says, “I am so proud of her.”

Can these two Le Pen women alone reshape the Front National to be the third force in French politics? Not without more MPs – although the party achieved more than 13 per cent of the vote in the 2012 national legislative elections, there are currently only two FN MPs in the Assembly. But the crisis with the euro and the economic recession gripping Europe are grist to their mill. And the FN’s anti-European Union stance finds echoes across the channel, where the UKIP is making inroads among Conservative Party voters.

The FN’s emphasis on protectionism, regulation of financial markets and what Pascal Perrineau calls “welfare-state chauvinism” chime with the rhetoric of the French left while also appealing to beleaguered conservative voters. Writing in left-leaning US magazine The Nation ahead of the presidential election, the French journalist Agnès Poirier noted: “[Marine] Le Pen has cunningly surfed on the euro crisis and blurred traditional and ideological boundaries … She [is] hunting on everybody’s grounds, stealing from all in the most unpredictable way.”

Will the UMP be forced to consider a coalition with the FN? Not at a national level, says Gilles Ivaldi, head of research at think tank, the National Centre for Scientific Research. “Leaders of the mainstream right have unambiguously rejected alliance with the FN,” he says. “Coalitions between the right and extreme right are more likely to take place at the local level, particularly in the southern regions, like Vaucluse, where the local UMP has traditionally had closer links with the FN.”

And Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, Ivaldi says, is already set to lead the FN municipal campaign in the south next year. I recall that in Carpentras, hotel manager Frédéric Van Orshoven had told me that he could see Marion as a town mayor – a position that is important in provincial France, much more than ceremonial. It seemed such an odd idea, this slender, educated Parisienne, chief among the stolid burghers, but he was quite serious.

I ask Ivaldi, could Marine Le Pen be president one day? Unlikely in the near future, he says. “The FN is still stigmatised by a majority of voters and the party remains isolated in French politics, where there is little space available to third parties outside of an alliance with one of the dominant actors of the left and the right.”

In the elegant upstairs room of his luxury home, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the family patriarch, sits in a silk upholstered armchair considering the future for his golden girls.

Le Pavillon de l’Ecuyer – the Squire’s Pavilion – is an imposing red-brick manor screened by tall horse-chestnut trees, their creamy candles just in flower, and set on a hill in the private, gated grounds of Montretout Park in the affluent suburb of Saint-Cloud. From the wide, balustraded stone terraces on ground and first floors, it seems the whole of Paris is spread at our feet: in the distance the tower of Montparnasse, the gold dome of Les Invalides, the roofs of Montmartre and – if you peer round the pink froth of a splendid Japanese cherry – the Eiffel Tower.

Through the open French windows with their pigeon-grey wooden shutters, there are the sounds of birdsong and children’s voices – several of Le Pen’s nine grandchildren are playing in the grounds with friends.

Of his three daughters, two still live here with their children: the middle one, Yann, occupies converted servants’ quarters on the top floor and the youngest, Marine, has an apartment over the former stable block. Their mother, Le Pen’s first wife Pierette, lives in a Hansel and Gretel-style chalet in the grounds.

After their very public split in 1987, Pierette posed for Playboy magazine, naked save for an apron, wielding a broom in protest at her husband’s suggestion that if she lacked money she should work cleaning houses. There had presumably been a rapprochement at some stage? “Why, yes,” says Le Pen expansively. “I could not deprive les petites of their grandmother.”

He believes that Marion might be more talented than her aunt: “She has started young,” he says, “so will have many years to gain experience, whereas Marine began in politics much later.”

He once called Marine “une petite bourgeoise” and now explains: “It was in comparison with my upbringing. I was born in a house with no floor. Marine is a woman of her time, she’s had a middle-class education, she has three children, she’s been divorced twice, women recognise themselves in her. And men are becoming more feminine, too.”

I look around the resolutely masculine room with its rows of leather-bound books, model ships, shelves of tiny lead soldiers and statuettes of Joan of Arc, long ago claimed by the FN as its nationalist figurehead. What on earth does this burly former parachute officer, the son of a Breton fisherman, make of a world in which men find their inner female and the movement he created is now headed by a woman?

“I approve of the way Marine is leading the party,” says her father, “and the direction in which she is bringing it – she’s very capable. Our ‘man’ today is actually a woman, Jeanne d’Arc!”

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