Profile: Marine Le Pen
Ms Le Pen has adopted more liberal positions on social issuesThe new leader of France's far-right National Front (FN) may have the blessing - and indeed the surname - of her predecessor, but her stated aim is to bring change to the party.
Marine Le Pen, who succeeded her father Jean-Marie Le Pen in January, is hoping to shed the party's xenophobic image and move it towards the mainstream of French politics.
She even objects to the term "far right", which she says marginalises a group that regularly attracts about 15% of voters in national elections.
"I refuse to accept as inevitable the fact that we are being demonised... that we have to continue to be insulted, consigned to the edge of political life," told the Associated Press (AP) news agency.
Mr Le Pen, 82, suggested himself that his daughter would bring new vigour to the movement he founded in 1972.
While stressing common ideals, he told Reuters that Marine was "a different person", adding: "She is a woman, 40 years younger than me and in tune with the times."
So much so, apparently, that her opinion poll ratings have been going up, reaching the levels of those of President Nicolas Sarkozy. In one recent poll she even came top while another said that one in two of those questioned saw the National Front as "a party like the others".
Commentator Agnes Poirier thinks Ms Le Pen may well "do better than her father in [the presidential elections of] April 2002, that is to say she is very likely to be present at the second round [of voting] and therefore likely to knock Nicolas Sarkozy out of the race… of the elections."
She again hit the headlines when she visited the Italian island of Lampedusa to make a point against immigration from North Africa. Lampedusa has been used as a way into Italy, most recently by thousands of migrants who left Tunisia after the overthrow of the regime there.
Legal brainThe youngest of Mr Le Pen's three daughters, Marine was born in 1968.
She has been steeped in politics from a young age, and learnt the trade by accompanying her father to meetings and rallies. She first campaigned with him when she was 13 years old.
After training as a lawyer at one of France's top law schools, she put herself on the list of public defenders ready to take any case where the defendant cannot afford a lawyer. That meant acting at times for illegal immigrants, something some of her rivals in the National Front still hold against her.
Paris barrister Basile Ader, who faced Marine Le Pen across the court room on occasion, says that "she was a good lawyer. She worked hard, did her homework and was on top of things."
However, she was not popular among lawyers: "Because she was overly identified with her father and therefore cast to one side. But I admired how she kept her cool and was able to maintain normal professional relationships despite being burdened with the notoriety of her father."
In 1998, she stopped practising as a lawyer and became the head of the National Front's legal department.
Childhood traumasShe was eight when their home in Paris was blown to pieces in a bomb attack. Despite the extensive damage, nobody was hurt. But for Marine Le Pen it was a harsh introduction to the burden of carrying the family name.
There was more trauma to come when she was sixteen and her mother Pierrette ran off with the man writing a biography of Jean-Marie. Jean-Marc Simon, Marine Le Pen's biographer, says the "brutal departure of the mother was a drama for Marine. She was only 16 and very close to her mother - they had the same rhythm, they cooked together, she followed her as much as possible. So there's a huge psychological rupture there."
"The second effect is that she became much closer to her dad," he adds. "Jean-Marie Le Pen had been very absent - like all men in politics, he couldn't boil an egg at that period if you see what I mean, but from this point he had to organise the family and the girls say that in the end he was a rock."
New imageMs Le Pen came to public notice during the presidential election in May 2002, when her father shocked the country by coming second in the first round with almost 18% of the vote. Her good looks, blonde hair and her ease with journalists secured frequent appearances in TV debates.
"I was noticed a bit by the media," she told AP. "Some said: 'Here's a woman, who is young, who contrasts with the caricatured image that some people might have of the National Front - a macho party, a rather tough party'."
Marine Le Pen is changing her image, physically and politicallyShe also reinvented herself. Journalist John Lichfield of the Independent says that "she's much more slender, she's lost a lot of weight, she's very elegant, she wears a lot of modern looking clothes, jeans, and she has completely changed her image, not just politically but as a woman."
But she has faced many critics - including within her own party. Some traditionalists dismissed her as little more than a pretty face, an unprincipled upstart who owed her prominence to her family connections.
Nevertheless she went on to build a political base as a regional councillor in Nord-Pas-De-Calais - a National Front stronghold hit hard by industrial decline.
In 2003, she became vice-president of the party, and managed Mr Le Pen's presidential campaign in 2007.
In 2009 she came close to victory in a northern mayoral election. Last year, her National Front list in Nord-Pas-de-Calais secured 22% of the vote in regional elections.
By then, Ms Le Pen had become a national figure in her own right. Few were surprised when she easily defeated rival Bruno Gollnisch in the January 2011 leadership contest.
'Occupation' rowMs Le Pen has championed traditional National Front ideas - a tough stance on immigration, opposition to globalisation and support for the death penalty. However the twice-divorced mother of three has adopted more liberal positions on social issues, notably abortion rights.
Marine's father and predecessor, Jean-Marie, has several convictions for racism or anti-SemitismFrench journalist Nabila Ramdani, who has seen her speak in public many times, thinks she is a good communicator: "She is very self-confident about how to engage with different audiences, how to present her ideas and indeed on how to win an argument.
"I have seen her engage with farmers at an agricultural fair," she says, "and [Marine] knows how to talk to farmers who traditionally represent the values of rural France, and that is very much what the party is about."
But despite her softer image and efforts to distance herself from her father's more abrasive statements, Ms Le Pen has attracted controversy.
During a speech in December 2010, she called the regular blocking of public streets for Muslim prayers in French cities an "occupation of parts of the territory".
Many accused her of drawing a parallel with the World War II occupation of France by Germany.
But she insists she aims to remove the stigma from the National Front, which has been shunned by all mainstream parties for four decades.
According to John Lichfield, Marine Le Pen now senses a political opportunity for "a more moderately presented, more middle class, more gently smiling form of extremism, rather than a snarling form of extremism".
You can hear BBC Radio 4's Profile of Marine Le Pen on the iPlayer, or download the podcast.
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