The “lowest blow,” according to the French magazine Marianne, came somewhere around the twenty-minute mark of a psychologically violent debate that took place in Paris on Wednesday night between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen, ahead of this Sunday’s second and final round of the French Presidential election. Unluckily for Le Pen, who is behind in the polls, the conversation was stalled on economic issues. After she confused two major companies—“One makes phones, the other makes turbines,” Macron offered—she appeared desperate to change the subject. The possibility of creating a sovereign investment fund for the French state came up, and, as Macron began to explain in goat-gettingly didactic tones why that probably wasn’t a good idea, Le Pen attacked. “I see you’re looking to play student and teacher with me, but, as far as I’m concerned, that’s not really my thing,” she said.

With her mention of giving lessons, Le Pen was possibly echoing François Mitterrand’s reproach of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing—“I’m not your student,” he said, in a debate in 1981—and definitely taking a shot at the romantic life of Macron and his wife, Brigitte Trogneux. They met in 1993, when Macron was in Trogneux’s drama class at a Jesuit high school in Amiens. He was fifteen. She was twenty-four years older, married, with three children. (One can’t help but wonder what Trogneux’s ex-husband must make of the double freak occurrence of losing his wife to a teen-ager, only to have him turn out, decades later, to be the presumptive Président de la République.) Her elder daughter, Laurence, was in Macron’s class. According to “Un Jeune Homme Si Parfait” (in English, the title would be “Such a Perfect Young Man”), a new book by Anne Fulda, when Macron’s parents heard about the affair, they initially thought their son was seeing Laurence. “You don’t understand, you already have your life,” Macron’s mother reportedly told a tearful Trogneux, who refused to promise to break off the affair. “He won’t have children!” He has no biological children, but he is close to his stepchildren, all of whom have been active in his campaign, and even his step-grandchildren, one of whom he was pictured feeding a bottle to, in Paris Match.

Knowing that Macron went through certain kinds of hell to win his happiness makes it all the more interesting—moving, even—to see him emerging as a powerful champion of the modern family in its many forms. The Sunday before the debate, Marine Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie, who co-founded her party, the National Front, delivered a May Day oration in Paris. Of Macron, he roared, “He talks to us about the future, but he doesn’t have children!” Many people have fallen for the notion that Marine’s expulsion of Jean-Marie from the Party, in 2015—he had made the latest in a long series of comments dismissing the Holocaust—was, as the Times columnist Ross Douthat wrote, “a quite costly and dramatic act of political purgation.” Perhaps it was personally difficult, but politically the arrangement is opportune. While technically speaking for himself, Jean-Marie can continue to promulgate the rancid ideas upon which the National Front is built, without the Party having to take responsibility for them. He also continues to promote his daughter’s candidacy. In Paris, speaking of the French nation as “a past from where we come, and without which we would not have existed biologically, physically, morally, or spiritually,” he sought to draw a privileged genealogy for Marine. She was, he said, “a daughter of France,” and, moreover, “une mère de famille.” (She has been divorced twice, has three children, and is in a relationship with the National Front’s vice-president, Louis Aliot.) Macron, in his rendering, was essentially a eunuch. As a knock on Macron’s manhood, the line also called up a ubiquitous rumor, which is that Macron is gay and in a relationship with the head of Radio France, Mathieu Gallet.

Back in February, Macron rather elegantly brushed off the whispers, saying, “If you’re told I lead a double life with Mr. Gallet, it’s because my hologram has escaped.” (One of his opponents, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, had just kicked off his campaign by beaming himself between Lyon and Paris.) But his response to Le Pen’s comment about his childlessness was something more earnest and full-throated, an impassioned rejection of the decrepit social order that limits filiation to a man and his seed. “I sensed in our country an immense fear of the future of the family,” he told a crowd of thirty thousand supporters, as Trogneux smiled in the audience. “Would I be an enemy of the family because mine is a little different, and I claim that totally?” Once the applause died down, he continued, “I heard the National Front’s message this morning. Mr. Le Pen told me, ‘You don’t have the right to talk about the future, because you don’t have children.’ Mr. Le Pen, I have children and grandchildren of the heart. It’s a family that you have to build, it’s a family you have to conquer, a family that doesn’t owe you anything, and that you will never have!”

Maybe it would have been nice to hear him assert that he didn’t need offspring of any sort in order to care about the fate of humankind, but Macron’s pride in his unconventional family and his insistence on its legitimacy nonetheless seemed like a kind of progress. If he is elected, the leaders of France, Germany, and the U.K. will have zero biological children among them. (Angela Merkel has two stepsons; Theresa May and her husband of thirty-six years were unable to have children. May spoke about the pain of that realization after a political rival suggested that she had more of a stake in the future than May by virtue of being a mother.) Perhaps because he wasn’t carrying the burdens of an entire gender when accounting for his decisions, Macron seemed completely at ease. He was saying, less apologetically than I’ve heard it said by a politician, that his family would be what he made of it, and that this was a cause for celebration, not suspicion or pity. His platform backs up his rhetoric, making special mention of the “diversity of family configurations”—married couples, couples in civil unions, co-habitating couples, parents who are together, parents who are separated, single-parent families, blended families, and same-sex-parent families—and promising to insure them equal rights under the law. (The president of La Manif pour Tous, an influential movement of social conservatives, many of them Catholic, has urged members of the group to vote against Macron, calling him “the openly anti-family candidate.”) Make all the hot-for-teacher jokes you want to. There is steel in his decision to, as he has put it, “have a life which does not in any way correspond to other peoples’ lives.”

During the debate, Le Pen and Macron finally moved on from economics, landing on the question of P.M.A., or medically assisted procreation. Le Pen—who has been trying to prevent a schism with the socially ultra-conservative wing of her party, led by her niece, Marion Maréchal-Le Pen—opposes the technology, saying that it should be reserved for heterosexual couples with infertility problems. Macron, on the other hand, wants to make P.M.A. available to single women and lesbian couples. (As for same-sex marriage, which was instituted in France in 2013, Macron supports it, saying “it’s an enrichment of what the family is in France,” while Le Pen advocates a return to a civil-union system.) Then they took on the issue of surrogacy, which is illegal in France. Neither Le Pen nor Macron is proposing to change that, but Le Pen accused Macron, who believes that children who are born by surrogacy elsewhere should be recognized in France, of “creating surrogacy networks abroad.” Macron’s reply was brutal: if he was a reckless baby-maker, then she was a heedless baby-killer, happy to let children “die in the street” rather than give them certain benefits if they weren’t French citizens. The exchange hinted at yet another kind of family that Macron will have to champion if he wants to be a truly paradigm-busting French leader: the one whose last name sounds nothing like Macron or Le Pen.