MARINE LE PEN has been in a litigious mood lately. In early July the far-right National Front leader’s defamation suit against Caroline Fourest and Fiammetta Venner, authors of a critical book on the Le Pen family, came to trial in Paris. It was predictably embarrassing for Ms Le Pen as a lot of familial dirty linen was being aired.

Undeterred, Ms Le Pen recently launched two other lawsuits. One is against Bernard-Henri Lévy, a celebrity-writer, for suggesting that an assault on three Jewish youths occurred because the National Front fosters anti-Semitism. The other is against Madonna, a pop singer, for superimposing a Nazi swastika on an image of Ms Le Pen that featured in a background video at a concert in Paris.

Ms Le Pen’s increased sensitivity to her public image stems from attempts to rebrand herself and her party over the past few years. The often virulent anti-Semitism and chauvinism of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the former leader of the National Front and Ms Le Pen’s father, has been dispensed with in a self-conscious process of dédiabolisation (decontamination).

In the recent presidential and legislative elections, the phalanx of skinheads who often accompanied her father to campaign rallies have been replaced with family-friendly faces. The nostalgic sentiments for Vichy or a French Algeria that once helped galvanise the extreme right have similarly been jettisoned. Whereas Mr Le Pen faced calls for his prosecution in 2009, after he described the Nazi death camps as a “detail of second world war history”, his daughter says the Holocaust represents the “summit of human barbarism”.

Ms Le Pen’s more moderate course is working—in particular with women. In a forthcoming study of voters undertaken after the recent presidential elections, Nonna Mayer, a professor at Sciences Po, argues that the increase in support for the National Front can almost entirely be put down to a shift in the allegiance of working-class women. The ordinary National Front voter remains “ethno-authoritarian” in outlook, typically expressing a profoundly nativist resentment towards immigrants and a belief that the state should take more concerted action towards clamping down on foreigners. Now, however, that voter is almost as likely to be female as male.

One group in particular has taken to Ms Le Pen. Approximately 30% of women working in routine non-manual professions (largely sales reps and shopkeepers) voted for her in the first round of the presidential elections. Just 13 % of women in the same category voted for her father in 2007.

An increased electoral appeal to women voters might help the National Front break the traditional glass ceiling of around 15% that it has struggled to breach in national elections. By minimising the gender gap among its working-class base, the National Front could claim the support of over 20% of the overall electorate, according to Ms Mayer.

New and younger candidates have also helped Ms Le Pen. Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, a 22-year-old law student and niece of Ms Le Pen, was one of two National Front candidates elected to the National Assembly. Florian Philippot, who looks after the front’s communication strategy, is a thirty-something graduate of the Ecole Nationale d’Administration, an elite school, and just the sort of egghead insider whom the party used to decry.

For all Ms Le Pen’s efforts, voters might eventually wise up to the front leader’s willingness to change her position if it is politically expedient. Her stance on reproductive rights is a salutary warning. Despite having vowed that she would not reduce public funding for abortion if elected to power, Ms Le Pen still seeks to rally pro-life voters in a Catholic country by decrying women seeking “comfort abortions”.

Jean-Marie Le Pen remains a nuisance, popping up recently to suggest that his daughter’s moderation on certain issues is a result of her petit-bourgeois upbringing in the family mansion in a rather posh suburb of Paris. His daughter will need to retain the support of the party’s old guard. The National Front has split before, notably in 1998 when Mr Le Pen’s long-serving deputy, Bruno Mégret, left to start his own group. The front claims to have recruited many new members since Ms Le Pen took over. Will they manage permanently to banish the anti-Semitic and chauvinistic front of Le Pen père?