Marine Le Pen with her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, in 2002, after learning that he would advance to the second round of France’s Presidential election. PHOTOGRAPH BY ALAIN NOGUES / SYGMA / GETTY

In the fall of 2005, as banlieues all over France burned, set alight by teens and immigrants enraged by their marginalization and their harassment by the police, Marine Le Pen prepared to release her memoir. It, too, begins with an explosion. In 1976, as an eight-year-old Marine was sleeping beside her two older sisters, Yann and Marie-Caroline, in their home in Paris’s quiet Fifteenth Arrondissement, a bomb went off in the stairwell of their apartment building. The “twenty kilos of dynamite,” which “gutted the building and transformed it into a dollhouse,” was intended to target Marine’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who had founded the far-right National Front party four years before. Marine describes the details that stuck in her child’s mind: a pet rabbit, Rainbow, “vitrified” on the sofa; the neighbor’s baby, hurled into space by the blast but saved by landing in a tree; the photographs from a Le Pen family album, strewn around the street—including snapshots of the three girls, naked, in the bath. (“We were mortified.”) The event, Le Pen writes, marked the beginning of her political awakening: “It took that night of horror for me to discover that my father . . . was in politics.”

Le Pen published her memoir in the spring of 2006, during a leave of absence from the National Front prompted by the first of her several public splits with her father. The book’s title, “À Contre Flots,” translates to “Against the Currents.” The cover of the first edition pictures Le Pen from behind, gazing at the breaking waves of the ocean, an image that evokes her family roots in coastal Brittany, but also her upstream struggle, and her promise to stop the waves of foreigners that she, like her father, said would destroy France. (She seems to like these resonances: the cover of her second book, a policy manifesto published in 2012, also shows Le Pen on a beach, her head thrown back and arms thrown open, in windblown clothing, like the heroine of a Nancy Meyers rom-com.) The book, which alternates between stream-of-conscious memories, narrated in the present tense, and vehement digressions on Islam, immigration, and secularism, charts Le Pen’s course from her childhood, through her studies and years as a lawyer, to the first divorce that left her a single mother, and her entrance into the National Front in the early aughts. It shows her fashioning an image as a new standard-bearer for her father’s party—one who would take over in 2011 and, eventually, expel him altogether.

“À Contre Flots” ’s major theme, beginning with the bombing in Marine’s youth, is her struggle against those who have sought to thwart her. They include educational and religious institutions, the media and “élites,” who have it out for the Le Pens, she says, “just because of our name.” Marine describes classmates who tormented her and her sisters in school, with the consent of their teachers. “We were confronted with a permanent hostility that nobody dreamed of concealing . . . I went to history, economics, and civics class with a knot in my stomach.” She describes how the press rushed to attack her family; after reading that the desecration of a Jewish cemetery was being attributed to Le Pen followers, “I was so shocked I almost choked on my toast.” Le Pen is not the first right-wing ideologue to emphasize her resilience in the face of those who’ve sought to cut her down. Just think of “Mein Kampf,” or of Donald Trump’s constant complaints that the press’s treatment of him is “very unfair!” But “À Contre Flots” makes use of a special brand of victimhood—that of the dutiful daughter, born into her father’s world, and doing her best to manage the hostility that she encounters as a result. She uses the child’s naïve point of view, narrating by allusion, in order to strip her opponents of content and context. Her prose reduces politics to family loyalty.

It is in this respect that Le Pen’s book seems most salient at the present, when women in several countries are playing crucial roles in promoting and sanitizing far-right populism. Last month, in an interview on “CBS This Morning,” when Gayle King asked Ivanka Trump whether she and her husband, Jared Kushner, were “complicit” in policies that hurt constituencies that they were expected to care about, Trump admonished King “not to conflate lack of public denouncement with silence.” Le Pen, who will face off against Emmanuel Macron tomorrow in the deciding round of the French Presidential election, demonstrates that the opposite approach might work as well. In “À Contre Flots,” she makes clear that we should not conflate her public denunciations of her father with an abandonment of his core principles. On the contrary: by publicly criticizing her father, by taking over the party he founded, and, finally, by expelling him from it, the daughter has managed to dédiaboliser, or “de-demonize,” many of his views. By surviving the unwilled predicament of being her father’s daughter, she proves that she has the steel to be his heir.

At the time she was writing, Le Pen told the press that the book would “stimulate debate” within the National Front. Really, it reads more like an apologia for the excesses of her father’s views. In a short chapter devoted to a 1987 scandal in which Jean-Marie Le Pen described the gas chambers as “a detail” in the history of the Second World War, she explains that this was simply a reflection of his tendency to “relativize” everything, and that this tendency has “hurt her personally,” too. How? One day, when he was asked about who would succeed him as the leader of the National Front, he joked that she might die before he did. “Behind it, there wasn’t any desire to hurt me, only a permanent reminder that it was necessary to take distance from things,” she explains. Similarly, when he said that the Holocaust was a mere historical “detail,” “I know he did not want to hurt anyone.”

Western culture has so many stories about ruling sons succeeding fathers. There are far fewer about daughters doing the same. Le Pen and Ivanka Trump are our most prominent contemporary examples of women made in their fathers’ image, but they are not the only women who are using their femininity to launder right-wing politics. We’ve seen it with another Trump surrogate, Kellyanne Conway, and we’re seeing it in Germany with Alice Weidel, the lesbian businesswoman who is one of two national candidates being supported by the far-right party Alternative für Deutschland for the elections in September. It is precisely because these women are improbable figures that they are so useful. They can deploy their femininity strategically—particularly against Muslim immigrants, whom they accuse of oppressing women and L.G.B.T. people. This isn’t Kinder, Küche, Kirche —that traditional stay-at-home role espoused by “lipstick fascists.” These privileged, professional women manage the challenges of modern life, then hold up their success as proof that the system works.

In a chapter on the challenges of raising children while navigating her career, Le Pen—like Ivanka in her oblivious new book “Women Who Work,” published earlier this week—treats her advantages as afterthoughts. “When journalists asked me about my hobbies, my eyes popped out of my head!” she writes. “For me, it was a miracle to find half an hour to take a bath. Even though my financial situation was much better than that of many mothers.” By the end of the book, she presents France itself as a kind of family, with a bond that lies as deep beyond reason as the bonds among kin. She quotes her father quoting Henry IV: “The immoderate love that I have for France has always made everything easy for me.” The view of a nationhood based in blood inheritance and blind emotion has a dangerous history in Europe, of course, but Le Pen is not interested in drawing lessons from the past. In a two-page conclusion, she turns to the future, where she says there will be “truths that are difficult to hear.” The memoir is dedicated to her own children, who she says will “someday understand” why she so often was not there. In the end, she has become her father’s daughter. But then, she always was.