Marion Maréchal Le Pen, the 26-year-old niece of France’s Front National leader Marine Le Pen has urged her fellow countrymen to join the military in a series of tweets following the beheading of a priest in Normandy this morning.

Reacting to the incident, Ms. Le Pen took to her Twitter account to double down on her message from just a few days before, and just after the attacks in Nice.

She said on Sunday: “Either we kill Islamism or it will kill us again and again. You are with us and against Islamism, or you are against us and for Islamism… Those who choose the status quo become complicit with our enemies.”

Her comments today herald yet another ramping up of her party’s action against Islamism and the threat faced by ordinary French people.

She said: “Faced with the threat that weighs on the France, I decided to join the military reserve. I invite all the young patriots to do the same,” followed by: “In the West as in the East, Christians must stand up to resist Islam!”

She added: “They kill our children, murdering our policemen and slaughter our priests. Wake up!”

Marine Le Pen’s approval ratings rose after the Nice attacks, though the media chose instead to focus on how the current President who faces an election next year, Francois Hollande, remained popular.

Marion Le Pen, who is a deputy (or Member of Parliament) in the Vaucluse region, has become an increasingly important figure in her party and in French politics lately.

In an interview with the Telegraph, she said radical Islam is implacably opposed to the French secular way of life, stating: “We have a heritage of faith linked to secularity, and I would always defend that. It’s quite opposite to the radical Islamic faith, which seeks to impose itself more and more on public life.”

She continued: “The attacks that took place in France at the Bataclan [in Paris last November] were carried out by terrorists who infiltrated their way into the flood of immigrants arriving from Greece.

“Free movement of goods and people is a way of feeding terrorism. France’s migration policy has contributed to the explosion of radical Islam here and to the genesis of those terrorists who are born in France.”

A devout Catholic, she defends comments made some time ago in which she said that “Islam should not have the same public space as Catholicism.

“We have traditions, cultural influences that are Christian. France is not an Islamic country, and Islam should not have the same place in public life.”

But she draws a distinction between the secular world of French politics and personal religion, insisting: “I make a big distinction between my political combat and my faith. I never mix the two.”

This morning an elderly priest was murdered in a hostage situation in a church south of Rouen, Normandy, northern France by Islamist attackers.

France’s Le Figaro reported the eye-witness account of a nun who managed to escape the Normandy church this morning while it was under attack by Islamist killers in order to raise an alarm.

The paper states that one of the “executioners” gave “an Arabic sermon from the altar”, and that deceased Father Jacques Hamel was forced to kneel before the men went for his throat with a knife.