Supermodel-slim in her black drainpipe jeans and six-inch heeled boots, Marion Marechal-Le Pen took the stage to a rock star’s welcome

Her beautiful, white face is everywhere in France these days. With her milky skin, opal eyes and perfectly straight nose, she smiles seductively from street posters and into the TV cameras, defying the bloodied and besieged French public not to adore her — and to trust her when she promises a bright new dawn.

In Marseille on Wednesday they turned out in their thousands to show their faith. Supermodel-slim in her black drainpipe jeans and six-inch heeled boots, Marion Marechal-Le Pen took the stage to a rock star’s welcome.

The vast public hall was a riot of waving tricolour flags and rapturous cheers. She responded as though she were Taylor Swift on a sell-out concert tour, raising her arms in a triumphal salute, tossing her long blonde hair coquettishly.

It made great theatre, but the adoration for this young woman should deeply concern anyone who values tolerance and moderation. Because this was a French National Front party rally, starring the Far Right’s new poster-girl — a vision of Aryan chic whose appearance masks her unlovely ideology.

This is a woman who, I’m told, used to spend her spare time galloping through the Provencal countryside on a bay gelding called Odin — coincidentally (or not), the name of the Norse God revered by the Nazis.

Marechal-Le Pen also happens to be the doting, and much-indulged, granddaughter of the National Front’s founder, the arch Right-winger Jean-Marie Le Pen, who recently likened her to Joan of Arc — because, he waxed, she seemed destined to save the country from the twin scourges of Islamism and mass immigration, in the same way the 15th century saint helped deliver France from English occupation.

For a 26-year-old one-time political ingénue, who clammed up and ran away in tears when a reporter asked her a simple question on the campaign trail five years ago, it’s quite some analogy.

But she has evidently toughened up since becoming an MP three years ago (aged 22, she was the youngest to be elected to the National Assembly in modern history) and as she launched into her address on Wednesday her supporters were spellbound.

To many voters in France’s regional elections who are alarmed by the sluggish economy, high unemployment, rising immigration — and not least the Muslim terror attacks on Paris — Marion’s Right-wing policies are attractive.

She has marched against gay marriage, claims the government is ‘peddling abortion as something run-of-the-mill’, would cut state-subsidised family planning and is against Muslim women being veiled.

Preaching a corrupted version of the so-called ‘replacement theory’ of evolution, she believes that the ‘decent’ white population of France is gradually being supplanted by immigrants — the implication being that incomers are ‘indecent’.

She recently said Muslims could only be French if they followed ‘customs and a lifestyle’ shaped by centuries of Christianity, and spoke French as their first language.

‘We are not a land of Islam,’ she declared. ‘In our country, we don’t wear djellaba clothing, we don’t wear a veil and we don’t impose cathedral-sized mosques.’ In Marseille, a city that is now up to 40 per cent Muslim, her crowd particularly loved one pledge, delivered with a slightly cruel curl of her upper lip, that should she win control of a huge, south-eastern swathe of France in these regional elections, there will be no more ‘substitute meals for anybody’.

As a defender of ‘monoculturalism’ over multiculturalism, she has vowed to make Muslims adopt every aspect of the traditional Gallic-Christian way of life. Here was a clear hint that she’d abolish halal lunches in schools and other institutions.

‘Du cochon! Du cochon!’ several people shouted approvingly from the floor of the packed hall, suggesting that French Muslims should be forced to eat pork: there could be no surer way of offending them.

The last time I attended an NF rally in this melting-pot Mediterranean port, eight years ago, an ageing Jean-Marie Le Pen was making his final run for the presidency, and his attendance attracted a sizeable number of oddballs and thugs.

On Wednesday, there wasn’t a skinhead or Swastika tattoo in sight. Young and old, male and female, the audience represented a cross-section of working-class French society. Monsieur and Madame Ordinary. Puzzlingly, a fair number were even of North African descent. Among them was a Tunisian-born woman, who had come with her portly French husband. ‘I just love Marion!’ she cooed. When I asked why she admired a woman reported to be as xenophobic as her grandfather — though she tends to use less rabid language — the woman, a social worker called Fatima, said she had met Marion Marechal-Le Pen and received her personal assurance that she wasn’t a racist.

‘Marion says she believes there are some good [immigrants] and some bad, and I think she’s right,’ she told me.

‘She is marvellous! So different from the tired old men who are running our country. She is our future!’

Earlier, when I mentioned to the restaurant hostess at my hotel that I was heading off to the rally, she offered a diametrically opposing view.

‘I hate her! She is against women!’ spat Anais Amiel, 36.

French far-right National Front (FN) President and candidate in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais Picardie region for the second round of the regional elections

She was especially incensed by Marechal-Le Pen’s vow to cut funding to family planning clinics, saying such a move would wreck the campaign her grandmother had joined to modernise France’s birth control and abortion laws. This was not the only reason for her deep-seated loathing. She was a ‘true Marseille’ resident, she said, and argued that immigrants had historically enriched its culture and economy. That changed in the Eighties when the city became a bastion of the National Front, its politicians describing immigrants as invaders, scapegoating them for every social ill.

Today, many mainly-immigrant tower blocks north of the Old Port are no-go zones where the street currency is arms and drugs, according to a teacher who still lives there.

Fifteen people have been killed there this year in gang wars. It is little wonder voters in the rest of the city feel betrayed by current mainstream politics.

It was Jean-Marie Le Pen who turned the south into an NF power base, and his grand-daughter drew on that legacy with an extraordinary performance in last weekend’s first round of the regional elections — the first test of French public opinion since the state of emergency was imposed after November 13 attacks in Paris.

Fearful and angry about Francois Hollande’s socialist government’s failure to tackle terrorism and the immigration crisis, disillusioned voters deserted the mainstream parties to give young Marechal-Le Pen a commanding lead as she seeks to gain control of France’s second most populated region. Far from the NF’s other traditional stronghold in the depressed, industrial north-east, this area, home to five million, stretches from the Italian border to the Rhone river, west of Marseille, taking in glamorous Riviera resorts.

On the first Sunday of voting, Marion Marechal-Le Pen won an astonishing 40 per cent of the vote. She looked set to claim outright victory in tomorrow’s second round ballot — until the panic-stricken Socialists decided in desperation to withdraw their candidate, urging supporters to vote instead for her main rival, the conservative Mayor of Nice, Christian Estrosi.

France’s Socialist prime minister Manuel Valls warned yesterday of a slide towards ‘civil war’ if the National Front wins power tomorrow. ‘We have reached a historic moment where the bottom line for our country is a choice between two options,’ Valls said. ‘One is the extreme right, which basically stands for division, a division that can lead to civil war.’

The other option, he said in a radio interview, was to vote for what the French call republican values — a country open to people of diverse cultures, as long as they accept the rules and authority of the French state.

Whatever the result when the votes are counted, the young Le Pen has set French politics on fire with her astounding success.

Marion Marechal-Le Pen, French National Front political party member and candidate for National Front in the Provence-Alpes-Cote d'Azur (PACA) region is surrounded by media as she leaves the polling station after casting her ballot during the first round of the regional elections in Carpentras

The popularity of the NF is set to spark an explosive three-way battle for the presidency in 18 months’ time. There is a real possibility the NF could become the main opposition party, supplanting the Centre-Right party led by former president Nicolas Sarkozy.

Only two candidates can reach the presidential run-off — and one might conceivably bear the surname Le Pen.

The length of France, voters appear to be lurching further towards the extreme Right than at any time in recent history. Almost one in three first-round voters backed the National Front, which was founded 43 years ago by the embittered ex-paratrooper and street-brawler Le Pen. When it first fought a national election, the party could muster barely 100,000 votes — just 0.5 per cent of the total.

It appealed mainly to disaffected white youths and old imperialists, who sat in Gauloise-fugged cafes, bemoaning the fall of the Fourth Republic — France’s post-war era of economic growth and welfare reform — and the decision to grant Algeria its independence.

A successful NF assault on the Elysee Palace, it was assumed, could only come from Jean-Marie Le Pen’s youngest daughter, Marine, who replaced him as leader four years ago, and has since done much to sanitise the party, at least superficially.

She introduced a raft of liberal policies, such as increasing welfare benefits, and unlike the younger Marion even supports gay marriage, much to the disgust of her 87-year-old father, who has branded homosexuals ‘a biological and social anomaly’.

But there is an alternative scenario — the subject of much speculation since last weekend’s seismic shift at the ballot box.

Given the growing infatuation with Marion (Marine’s sister’s daughter) wouldn’t the younger woman make an equally, even more, appealing presidential candidate, if not in 2017 (when she may be thought too young), then four years later, when she will have turned 30? Comparing them, as they campaigned this week at either ends of the country, it seemed plausible.

In the far north, the older woman, Marine, won the first round by an equally large majority. Much of her support came from Calais residents desperate to see the port purged of asylum-seekers trying to reach Britain, and their ‘New Jungle’ camp closed. There, it was clear that Marine remains very much in charge. For now.

Marine is wilier, more in command of her brief, and by far the more powerful orator. When it comes to image and style, however, the youthful Marion eclipses her. Though still only 47, Marine is thick-waisted, jowly and gravel-voiced — the legacy, it is said, of too much high-living. Twice divorced, and now living with the Front’s vice-president, she also carries plenty of personal baggage. Even though Marine and Marion were wrapped in each other’s arms on the platform at an NF rally on Thursday night in an exclusive area of Paris, the older woman is beginning to look like yesterday’s model.

Callow though Marion may be, Le Pen senior certainly sees ‘Joan of Arc’ as his chosen successor and not only because Marine recently threw him out of the party for repeating the assertion that the Holocaust was of little importance. The pair no longer communicate, but Marine’s actions only strengthened his ties with Marion, who spoke out against his expulsion.

She and her grandfather have always been close. Hanging in Marion’s constituency office, in the Provencal town of Carpentras, there is a fading poster which depicts her at three years old, nestling in Le Pen’s arms. According to Front observers, even then he was grooming her to take his mantle.

He clearly mentored her well. ‘She has, in effect, replaced her grandfather . . . from whom she borrows her world view and rhetoric,’ Professor Cecile Alduy, a respected analyst of French Far Right politics, told me this week.

‘She says exactly the same things as he used to, except for the anti-Semitic comments he indulged in. But she presents much better: as young, fresh, joyful. She is his direct heir, even more than Marine. She embodies the values and world view of the Far Right.’

No doubt, and yet we have heard little of this in recent days. During a fractious television debate with her seasoned rival, the Nice Mayor, Christian Estrosi, she contrived to make the older, experienced candidate seem like an indignant history master being taken to task by his smartest and prettiest sixth-former.

With her girlish good looks, she seemed less threatening than some UKIP candidates.

We shouldn’t, however, be fooled. Her education in the politics of prejudice took place at her grandfather’s knee behind the high walls of Montretout, a magnificent 17th century compound in a western Paris suburb, which once belonged to Marie Antoinette. It was bequeathed to Jean-Marie Le Pen by a wealthy benefactor. (For all his man-of-the-people pretences, he has a multi-million fortune, and is under investigation for tax fraud).

Virtually the entire clan has lived there, either in the manor-house or its outbuildings, and many still do. Among them was Marion’s rebellious mother, Yann, who dropped out of university to work at Club Med before giving birth to her, unmarried, in 1989.

Dreamily described once by her grandfather as a ‘wheat-haired child of good stock’, Marion takes her hyphenated surname from her stepfather, the former NF youth leader Samuel Marechal, who married her mother when she was four. They had three children, Marion’s step-siblings, before divorcing 14 years ago.

French far-right party leader Marine Le Pen, right, hugs her niece and regional leader for southeastern France, Marion Marechal Le Pen, during a meeting in Nice

She didn’t meet her natural father David Auque, who died last year, until she was 13. He was a journalist and diplomat — and earlier this year was also revealed to have been an agent for the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad. She is clearly sensitive about her relationship with her father, and two years ago sued a French magazine for reporting their early estrangement, winning 10,000 euros in damages.

However, it is said that her chaotic start impelled her to lead an orderly, disciplined life; and whatever we might think of her politics, she appears to have done so.

She attended an exclusive Catholic college and then a Right-wing law school (although not the Sorbonne, as her PR blurb claims), earning a basic, first-stage diploma before leaving to become an NF activist.

She makes the annual pilgrimage from Notre Dame in Paris to the cathedral at Chartres, a three-day walk, and last year became the first Far Right politician to attend a summer conference organised by a Catholic group. Her invitation came from the Bishop of Toulon, no less, who shrugged off protests from Catholics that her anti-immigration policies were incompatible with Christian values.

Her constituency deputy, Herve de Lepinau, told me she drinks little alcohol, doesn’t smoke, and isn’t a great fan of night-clubs. Hasn’t she any vices? Riding her motorbike ‘fast’, he says.

The only blip in this wholesome existence came last year, when — quelle horreur! — she fell pregnant before marrying the child’s father, Matthieu Decosse, a failed National Front candidate turned ‘event organiser’. The couple rectified matters three months before the birth of their daughter, Olympe.

So now St Joan’s halo is back in place, and — to quote the mantra she shouted, as the Marseille rally reached its thunderous climax, she and her Far Right comrades are ‘ready’. By which she means ready to lead the nation.

Given France’s many troubles and the failings of its mainstream parties, both on the Left and the Right, the French people’s flirtation with this beguiling young woman is perhaps understandable.