Florian Philippot, the National Front's vice president | THOMAS SAMSON/AFP/Getty Images National Front: Merkel wants migrants as ‘slaves’ French far-right targets Germany.

MARSEILLE, France — Marine Le Pen's top aide accused German Chancellor Angela Merkel Saturday of encouraging illegal migration to Europe so that her country's industry would be supplied with "slaves," as the far-right National Front party hardened its anti-immigration stance.

Florian Philippot, the National Front's vice president, also said that Merkel had exploited an outpouring of sentiment sparked by a photograph of a dead Syrian Kurdish child washed up on a beach in order to press the idea of migrant quotas — or distributing migrants among EU member states — on neighbor states, like France, that had opposed them.

"Germany needs market slaves to supply its industry," Philippot said during a speech at an annual gathering of the National Front in the southern city of Marseille. "Using the photo of a drowned child to serve the cynical cause of Germany's capitalists — that's how far we have come, my friends."

Philippot's attack, which came days after France and Germany proposed making migrant quotas mandatory, coincided with an unprecedented toughening of the National Front's stance on both legal and illegal migration.

The party has long advocated an end to the Schengen free-travel zone, France's withdrawal from the euro currency, drastic reduction of immigration and a policy of "national preference" by which social services would be given first to people of French nationality. It is also fiercely critical of Germany, which Le Pen accuses of running the European Union according to an economic "diktat" of low-inflation and a strong euro.

But with regional elections coming up in December, Marine Le Pen and her aides have hardened their discourse on both fronts and seemingly found a way of combining the two. While urging a halt even to legal migration, they have been making more frequent reference to the so-called "great replacement" theory — an idea borrowed from French writer Renaud Camus which holds that local populations will end up being "replaced" by newcomers who reproduce more speedily than Europeans if the current pace of migration keeps up.

It echoes statements by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who has said that the influx of migrants from the Muslim countries was threatening Europe's Christian culture.

Senior National Front officials interviewed by POLITICO said they feared dire consequences for their country's future — notably that some immigrant-heavy areas might try to break away from the Republic to form independent Muslim enclaves.

"What are we going to do in 30 or 40 years if Seine-Saint-Denis asks to become independent, in the name of self-determination?" said Marc Etienne Lansade, mayor of the southern town of Cogolin and a close ally of Marion-Maréchal Le Pen, referring to an immigrant-heavy area near Paris. "It's plain to see what going on with the extreme flows of migrants and the elevated birth rates among immigrant populations, up to four times ours, is fairly plain to see."

Bernard Monot, a member of European Parliament and economic adviser to Marine Le Pen, said that mass migration was threatening France's "millenial" Judeo-Christian culture.

"There is an exponential increase in the number of foreigners in France who have many more children than we do and who, sooner or later, are going to become the majority," he said. "That means they bring in their own culture, and the French culture will become diluted in this magma, unless we do something strong to reverse the trend."

However, not all Front officials agreed with the diagnosis.

David Rachline, mayor of the southern town of Frejus, told POLITICO he was uncomfortable with the expression"great replacement."

"Other people are free to throw that around, but I won't use it," he said.