France is in the grip of social breakdown, with financial chaos looming. The urgent question now is: could it spread? A leading expert on Europe and its discontents, Wolfgang Münchau explores how the next debt crisis might start — and how it could both destroy the eurozone and scar Britain’s economy. 

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“The Irish say they are not Greece. The Portuguese say they are not Irish. The Spanish finance minister said last week that Spain is not Portugal.” I wrote these words in the Financial Times over 15 years ago, as the eurozone sovereign-debt crisis raged. Fast forward to today, and the big news is that Belgians are not French. Expect, soon enough, to hear that Italians are not Belgian. With all eyes currently on France, on the violence, the protests, and the rising possibility of a genuine financial crisis, the key question now is how such a crisis might spread.

The first eurozone country in the firing line today is Belgium. Like the French, the Belgians allowed their budget deficit to rise, and the national debt to soar. To be fair, the country’s leaders are aware of the risks. To quote Bart De Wever, Belgium’s prime minister and one of Europe’s smarter leaders: “We absolutely must distance ourselves from the French situation to prevent it from spreading to us.” He might as well be telling us that “Belgians are not French”.

In the event, I worry De Wever will have less control over the situation than he thinks. That’s partly because Belgium’s debt-to-GDP ratio — at 108% — is so high. But also because the other two countries in the danger zone are France and Italy: respectively the EU’s second and third-largest economies, and two of the most indebted countries in the bloc.

At the moment, French costs on 10-year bonds is over 5%, with the Italian rates a little lower. To be clear, neither of these rates are in crisis territory just yet — but they are getting closer. Once interest rates exceed a certain threshold, a doom loop sets in. Higher interest rates raise debt servicing costs, which drives up the budget deficit, which drives up borrowing, and which again drives up interest rates.

No one can tell when, exactly, a crisis might arrive: it depends on the country and its politics. Yet once investors conclude that a country cannot conceivably afford to pay the debt, interest rates will surely start to jump, the mechanism through which practically every financial crisis plays out. We are in the phase where everybody still pretends that the situation is under control, and that all that needs to happen is for governments to save a bit of money here and there. In practice, though, ministers of all stripes find this hard.

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Just recall that France is in its current mess because of Emmanuel Macron. Who could have predicted that his decade-long presidency would end with his country in flames, and with a financial crisis looming? Yet the policies Macron pursued earlier in his tenure nonetheless led him here. The austerity imposed by his government bred more violence, while cuts in public investment deterred private investors.

Looking at the presidential candidates in France today ahead of the election next April, I struggle to see how the country will end up with a government that succeeds in doing all of the following: bringing the budget deficit under control; avoiding social unrest; complying with European rules; and staying in the eurozone. Something has to give here.

Nobody, not even leading French candidate Marine Le Pen, wants to quit the eurozone. Nor, for that matter, does Jean-Luc Mélenchon. If you thought Brexit was disruptive, a euro exit would be on a different order of magnitude. Yet what many Europeans, including politicians, don’t understand is the relationship between debt and membership of the eurozone. Put simply: you can’t default on your debt and expect to keep the euro. Debt serves as collateral for the money the banking system gets from the ECB. If a country defaults on its debt, the banking system inevitably freezes up.

Given these fundamentals, how might a eurozone crisis actually play out? Le Pen, even more likely to win the presidency now that Paris is burning, is probably crucial here. One option is that, notwithstanding her rhetorical largesse on the campaign trail, she decides to impose austerity once in the Élysée. Her popularity ratings would soon slump, and would likely not recover. You might think this is totally irrational, but we saw this pattern repeat itself over and over again during the eurozone crisis.

Alternatively, Le Pen might conclude that France cannot service its debt if interest rates stay high. She could therefore ask the European Central Bank for a bailout. If the ECB refused — helping France would drive inflation up for everyone — a President Le Pen might instruct her finance minister to default on a payment to bondholders.

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In the short-term, at least, there are advantages to such an approach. First, it would free Le Pen up to default on more foreign debtors. That, in turn, could allow her to impose less austerity than she might otherwise have had to. France also would benefit from lower debt-servicing costs, and a more competitive exchange rate, making French companies more competitive against the rest of the world. And perhaps most importantly, France will have its own central bank, one able to set interest rates suited to the country’s economy, and which could be relied upon to act as a backstop in a crisis.

All the same, France defaulting on its debt would likely lead to a French exit from the euro. Should we ever get to this point, the ensuing financial crisis would dwarf everything we have ever experienced. Financial institutions would fail all over the world. For its part, the eurozone might not survive, as other countries default on their debts and crash out in turn. Ironically, one of the European countries most affected in this scenario would be the UK. Despite not being a member of the EU, let alone the eurozone, Britain’s capital market would be deeply vulnerable to chaos across the Channel.

You might well wonder why anyone in their right mind would choose this scenario. The problem is that we’d only get to the implosion of the European financial system after several other things happened first. No one would choose it from a menu.

I’m not saying that there’s no way out. But none of the alternatives are obvious or easy. Leaving the eurozone might well end up being the easiest option, especially if you don’t care about the consequences for the rest of the world.

Having spent a good part of my career writing about the eurozone’s financial crisis, and its ongoing economic decline, I concluded that the one big mistake the EU committed was to choose a monetary union without installing the necessary political infrastructure first: a fiscal union, a single capital market, and a single sovereign debt instrument. The introduction of the euro was the crowning achievement of Europe’s political integration in the Eighties and Nineties. Then it stopped.

This is not an argument about the pros and cons of European integration as such. If you oppose political integration, you should not join the euro. The UK’s opposition to the euro was internally coherent. Poland is an example of a country that would not dream of leaving the EU, but it, too, chose not to join the euro. But what we’ve learned in the last 15 years is that if you join a single currency, you don’t want to stop there; you must go all the way. This is where the bloc went wrong. A half-way house of an unfinished monetary union is unsustainable. By unsustainable, I don’t mean bad. Just that either it’ll be made sustainable — or it’ll end.

Some people argue that political integration may yet happen. I fear this is wishful thinking. The politics of the EU has been moving away from political integration for quite some time; the euro crisis was probably the last moment when a fiscal union could have been realistically agreed. Back then, the far-Right was not yet a political force in most countries, while Germany’s economy was strong enough to theoretically accept a closer union. The fact that, even then, Angela Merkel said nein is telling — certainly, in its newly weakened state, none of Germany’s bickering political parties even mention EU integration today.

Superficially, the euro crisis ended when the ECB supported national bond markets through quantitative easing. But the underlying problem of economic divergence between member states was never really resolved, even as the solutions were only designed for small economies. So, if you tell me that France is not Greece, I’d happily agree — except to add that it’s worse.

Le Pen was born on 20 June 1928, in the Breton fishing village of La-Trinité-sur-Mer. He was christened “Jean”, but later affixed his middle name “Marie” to his first, hoping that the reference to the Virgin would attract Catholic voters. The family origins were modest: his father was a fisherman, his mother a seamstress. Nicknamed the “Menhir” — the Celtic term for a prehistoric stone monolith — Le Pen made much of his Breton origins. Who, after all, could be more “French” than someone rooted in the soil of ancient France?

Le Pen’s father died in 1942, when his fishing boat hit a mine. Though an accident, he was accorded the statute of someone who had “died for France” and so his son became a “pupille” (ward) of the nation. A clever but undisciplined schoolboy, Jean-Marie was educated at both state and Catholic schools, and ultimately expelled from two. In 1946, he left Brittany to study at the law faculty in Paris, financing his studies by taking on small jobs. He soon discovered his taste for politics as a student activist at the head of the “Corpo” — the union of law students. At a time when French politics was dominated by the Left, the Corpo was ferociously anti-communist and committed to the defense of empire. From the start, then, Le Pen was firmly on the nationalist Right, skeptical of Resistance worship and sympathetic to the disgraced Vichy regime.

Handsome and dashing, the young Le Pen entered a bohemian world of hard drinking, womanizing and partying. In 1958 he was a second in a duel — one of the last to ever happen in France — between the Marquis de Cuevas, a flamboyant ballet impresario, and the dancer Serge Lifar. With Le Pen, violence was never far away. Political meetings at this time frequently degenerated into violence, and Jean-Marie was always in the thick of it. When Jacques Isorni, Marshal Pétain’s former defense lawyer, stood for parliament in 1951, Le Pen’s Corpo formed part of his bodyguard, ready to rough up political opponents. Le Pen never fully abandoned this style of politics, even after entering the mainstream. In 1997, when supporting the candidature of one of his daughters at an election, the 70-year-old Le Pen plunged into a crowd of demonstrators, physically attacking the Socialist candidate. “Run away you red-headed faggot!” he shouted to one demonstrator. In the Sixties, when he first entered politics, Le Pen acquired an air of romantic menace by wearing a black eyepatch. For many years, he let it be known that he had lost his eye in a political brawl. The more mundane reality was that he’d suffered an accident while erecting a tent for a political meeting. Later, the eye patch was replaced by a less intimidating glass eye.

Instead of setting up as a lawyer after graduating, Le Pen enlisted in the army in order to serve in French Indochina, where his country was battling a communist-backed nationalist insurgency. This satisfied both his political convictions and his predilection for violence and adventure. But Le Pen arrived in Saigon just after the disastrous French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, in May 1954, and which effectively ended French hopes of holding on to its possessions in Southeast Asia. Le Pen returned to France a year later, bitter about those politicians who had been ready to sell out his beloved empire. He now joined Pierre Poujade and his anti-establishment movement. It had emerged as a popular protest against taxes — but soon became an expression of wider discontents about economic modernization and perceived national decline.

Le Pen showed himself to be a brilliant campaigner and an exceptionally gifted orator. In January 1956, 53 Poujadists were elected to parliament, among them the 25-year-old Jean-Marie. In one characteristic early intervention in parliament, he attacked the Left-wing politician Pierre Mendes France: “Monsieur Mendes France you crystalise in your person a certain number of repulsions that are patriotic and almost physical”. Mendes France, a Gaullist during the war, had been the prime minister who’d ended the French presence in Indochina. Yet Le Pen’s mention of “physical” repulsion was widely assumed to be an antisemitic innuendo. Certainly, provocations and insults of this kind were the stock in trade of Le Pen’s style throughout his career.

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Quickly realizing that Pouajde lacked the political intelligence to capitalize on his electoral success, Le Pen decided to enlist as a paratrooper in Algeria, where a nationalist revolt had broken out against French rule. This choice again corresponded to Le Pen’s taste for action and his belief in the importance of France’s empire. It was also good publicity for a newly elected parliamentarian to show he was ready to fight for his country. Two decades later, Le Pen’s six months in North Africa would become controversial when he was accused of torture. As far back as 1956, he’d declared in parliament that torture was “necessary and just”. In a 1962 newspaper interview he was unequivocal: “I have nothing to hide. I tortured in Algeria because it was necessary to do so”.

By the Eighties, though, Le Pen had changed that “I” to a “we” — claiming he’d been describing the army generally rather than him personally. Even so, evidence about his activities continue to appear. In 1984, for instance, an Algerian claimed that as a child he’d witnessed the torture and death of his father at the hands of a French soldier. He then produced a dagger left behind by one of the killers. Engraved on it were the words “JM Le Pen 1REP”. Historians, for their part, have also uncovered extensive archival evidence of Le Pen’s personal involvement in torture, including a report in 1957 from a French police commissioner. Not to be dissuaded, Le Pen pursued several legal cases against people accusing him of torture. He lost every time. The conclusion, then, must be that Le Pen was a torturer, and an enthusiastic one at that.

De Gaulle’s return to power ultimately led to Algeria’s independence in 1962. During that year’s parliamentary elections, Le Pen lost his seat. In 1965, he became the campaign organizer for Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour, standing as the candidate of the extreme-Right against de Gaulle for the presidency. During the Second World War, Tixier-Vignancour had been a junior minister in the Vichy regime. He later acted as the defense lawyer for several French officers who’d launched a coup against de Gaulle, hoping that a change of government in Paris could forestall Algerian freedom.

The putsch failed — but in 1965, Le Pen proved himself a dynamic organizer and brilliant campaigner. As a warmup act, he outshone the candidate he was supposedly introducing. In the end, Tixier scored only 5% of the vote. Le Pen felt, as with Poujade, that he had greater leadership qualities than the politician he’d chosen to serve. For the moment, though, the prospects of the far Right were at rock bottom, and Le Pen earned his living by setting up a company producing discs of military music and marching songs. Among others, that included the Horst Wessel Lied, a Nazi anthem.

Le Pen returned to politics in 1973, as head of the newly formed Front National (FN), a union of various extreme Right organizations. The brains behind the new operation was François Duprat, a virulent antisemite and one of France’s earliest Holocaust deniers. He became an intellectual mentor to Le Pen, and after his assassination in by Right-wing rivals in 1978, Le Pen attended an annual memorial ceremony in Duprat’s honor. Le Pen was approached to be leader of the new FN because he’d once been an MP, giving him an aura of respectability. It also helped that he boasted an extensive address book of Right-wing contacts, while equally not being associated with any one specific group. His brilliant oratorical skills were another attraction..

The FN party said it supported a “national and social renewal” (redressement) — exactly the word Pétain had used in 1940 to describe his own vision for France. In the presidential election of 1974, Le Pen secured only 191,000 votes (0.75%). In 1981, he didn’t even gather enough signatures to be qualified to stand. But though he was still politically marginal, Le Pen’s personal situation changed dramatically when, in 1976, he inherited a colossal fortune from the Right-wing industrialist Hubert Lambert. The will was unsuccessfully contested by Lambert ‘s family, and Le Pen moved into a palatial new residence. A few months later, the house suffered a massive bomb attack. The bombing was possibly organized by a rival far-Right faction, though was more probably related to the contested inheritance. At any rate, Le Pen’s newfound wealth gave him political independence, and the FN practically became Le Pen’s family affair.

Politically, too, his fortunes were about to change. From the mid-Seventies, the post-war boom had started to stall. In response, Le Pen shifted his rhetoric away from imperial nostalgia and anti-communism towards a new theme: immigration. “One million unemployed equals one million too many immigrants,” was one new slogan. Le Pen also claimed that foreigners were responsible for alleged increases in delinquency and crime. His political breakthrough came at the municipal election of 1983, when an FN candidate was elected to the municipality of Dreux outside Paris. At the European elections the following year, the FN scored 11% of the vote. Suddenly, Le Pen had become a national figure. Invited for the first time to speak on television, he proved as effective a performer on the small screen as in public meetings: his truculent eloquence was a refreshing contrast to the slicker performances of most politicians. The FN received a further boost in 1986 when the Socialist President François Mitterrand, knowing that he risked losing forthcoming parliamentary elections, decided to introduce proportional representation as a way of splitting the Right-wing vote. At the elections, the FN duly obtained 35 seats. Le Pen returned to parliament for the first time since 1962.

He now sought to give himself international stature. He was photographed meeting Ronald Reagan in 1987; he visited Saddam Hussein of Iraq in 1990. He also developed ties with Sung Myun Moon, the Korean leader of an anti-communist sect, who financed his campaigns. FN propaganda also mediatised the Le Pen family, showing the Breton paterfamilias with his wife Pierrette, and their three blonde, blue-eyed daughters. This vision of the happy family was shattered, however, when the marriage broke up and Pierrette posed in Playboy to embarrass her husband. The children sided with their father, and Le Pen remarried in 1991.

From the mid-Eighties, the rise of the FN seemed inexorable. At the presidential election of 1988, Le Pen scored 14.4% of the vote, coming fourth in the first round. In 1995, he slightly increased his score, coming fourth again. At municipal election in 1995, the party for the first time won control of four townhalls, including in Toulon. But though Le Pen was becoming a familiar figure of French politics, he hadn’t been entirely tamed. In 1987, during the trial of Klaus Barbie, Le Pen questioned whether the Nazi gas chambers had existed. As the Butcher of Lyon sat in court, Le Pen also called the Holocaust a “detail” of history. The following year, he made a sick joke about gas chambers. These opinions certainly expressed Le Pen’s own antisemitic convictions, but they were also calculated provocations to keep him in the news. No wonder one popular satirical TV show portrayed him as a vampire.

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Some in the Front National began to wonder if Le Pen was serious about achieving political power, or whether he was happier being an eternal provocateur. Bruno Mégret, Le Pen’s deputy, pushed for an alliance with the center-Right at the price of toning down some of his more extreme rhetoric. Mégret was far from a moderate — it was he who introduced the theme of Islamophobia into FN rhetoric — but Le Pen resented any challenge to his authority. Expelling Mégret from the party in 1998, he declared: “I am killing Brutus before Brutus kills me”. Mégret took most of the administrative infrastructure of the FN with him, and many believed that Le Pen was politically finished. Then came the bombshell presidential election of 2002 where, to universal surprise, Le Pen beat the Socialist candidate and qualified for the second round.

That bombshell result was partly the result of a split in the Left-wing vote in the first round. Yet it was also evidence that Le Pen was now appealing to many working-class voters, erstwhile Leftists but who felt the Socialists no longer spoke for them. In the end, of course, shock at Le Pen’s success pushed mainstream politicians into an alliance to defend democracy. During the election’s second round, Le Pen was trounced, barely improving on his first-round score.

What seemed like an inexorable rise seemed to have been checked at the next presidential election, in 2007, when Le Pen’s vote slipped to 10% and he found himself in fourth place after the first round. But this was because the successful candidate of the Right, Nicolas Sarkozy, shamelessly muscled into Le Pen’s territory, borrowing the FN leader’s themes of threatened national identity. What seemed like a setback was, in some sense, an ideological victory. As Le Pen had always said, in the long run voters would always “choose the original over the copy”. This proved prescient.

Sarkozy partly won in 2007 because he was young and dynamic, while Le Pen, just shy of his eightieth birthday, seemed like a figure from the past. Even he now realized it was time to pass the baton on. In 2011, his daughter Marine succeeded him at the head of the party, while her father remained the FN’s honorary president. Marine Le Pen, while in no way comprising the party’s core values, quickly set out to “detoxify” the brand, dropping the antisemitic and pro-Vichy references that repelled so many voters. Her strategy seemed to work: at the election of 2012, her 18% score in the election was more than Jean-Marie had ever achieved. But the incorrigible Le Pen, perhaps jealous of his daughter’s success, refused to play by the new rules. In 2015, he gave an interview defending Pétain. Marine Le Pen responded by expelling him from the party. This act of parricide ended Le Pen’s political career.

Yet the old bruiser still managed to cause a stir, publishing two volumes of memoirs. The first, appearing in 2018, was an instant bestseller. Its publication, just before the FN party congress, was timed to cause maximum embarrassment to Le Pen’s daughter. The memoir settled plenty of old scores and delivered a final verdict on de Gaulle. “A false great man whose destiny was to help France to become small,” Le Pen proclaimed at the very moment his daughter was busy adopting the general as a hero. Perhaps ironically, though, such provocations may ultimately have helped Marine campaign to present a more moderate façade — not that there’s any reason to think this was his plan.

Over an astonishingly long career — at his death he was the last surviving parliamentarian from the Fourth Republic — Le Pen had helped to transform the French political landscape. He was a precursor of the populist and racist nationalism that has now become the common currency of democratic politics. Eloquent and thuggish, charming and brutal, he was rooted in a long French tradition of far-Right politics. The Pétainism of the Forties was one incarnation, but Le Pen had the skill to adapt that heritage to the changed conditions of the Seventies and beyond. The man himself may now be dead, in short, but Lepenism still poisons the bloodstream of his nation’s politics.

Both parties engaged in a campaign to mainstream this ideology, most recently through a rejection of the far-Right’s most infamous association — antisemitism. Faced by the Hamas attack on Israel, they have made a point of affirming their freedom from this taint: Marine Le Pen is one of a clutch of far-Right leaders denouncing Hamas, flatly stating that “the security of the Israeli people is non-negotiable”. Zemmour, himself Jewish, took part in a march in Paris in solidarity with Israel on 12 October. Indeed, it has been Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the radical Left group La France Insoumise, whose ambiguity over the attacks has attracted the most criticism. The French Prime Minister, Elizabeth Borne, whose father survived Auschwitz, called Mélenchon’s stance “revolting”.

However, excising old hatreds is just one part of this new wind which is reshaping French politics. For a start, there is no contradiction between the youth of its leaders and their beliefs, with over 40% of 18-34-year-olds voting Le Pen in the second round of the last presidential election. To be in these posts is doubtless a vast responsibility for a young man and woman with no experience of international relationships or of government beyond local level. Yet, as activists since their teens, they act with the swagger of revolutionaries, dedicated to a radical politics built on Euroscepticism, national sovereignty, minimal immigration, strengthened families, raising Europe’s declining birth rate, and the regeneration of the Christian faith. It is a direct challenge to liberal politics of every stripe, at a time when liberalism itself is under several kinds of attack.

They have a better than even chance of success, with a combined third of the country polling for both parties in the lead up to next year’s European elections, ahead of the Left alliance and Macron’s own party. And if they achieve any elected office, they will transform more than France. They will destroy a Franco-German geopolitical engine, fuelled by constant pro-EU leadership in both states, which has kept the European Union together for decades, and without which most EU officials believe it will sputter and fail. But though they have this ambition in common, Maréchal and Bardella are near-opposites in constitution and character. Between them, they capture two faces of this new politics, and explain how it has managed to attract such a large section of French society.

Marion Maréchal is, in the world of fringe politics, the establishment candidate, brought up within the wealthy Le Pen family. Her grandfather is Jean-Marie Le Pen, who originally founded the Front National but is now 95 and only occasionally heard from. For some years Maréchal took his name and her adoptive father, Samuel Maréchal (married to Yann Le Pen, who has taken no part in her family’s politics), was leader of the National Youth movement. At the age of two, she was already appearing with Jean-Marie in election posters.

She joined the RN, successor to Front National, at 18, and became the youngest member of the French National Assembly at 22. At around this time, Marine Le Pen, daughter of Jean-Marie and Maréchal‘s aunt, inherited the party from her father, and set about trying to rid it of his obsessive antisemitism and white supremacism, while retaining its core nationalist and anti-immigrant positions. In November last year, she passed over the leadership of the RN to her protégé, Bardella, taking for herself the leadership of the much-enlarged party in the Assembly, with the intention of standing once more for the presidency in 2027.

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Bardella’s youth was nothing like Maréchal’s — aside from his passion for far-Right politics. He was born to a family of part-Italian origin and grew up on a social housing estate in Drancy, a north-eastern suburb of Paris. He joined what was still the Front National at 16, saying he was inspired by Marine Le Pen, and became a regional secretary at 19, before launching a group called “Patriotic Suburbs”, aimed at reaching out to voters “in the forgotten territories of the Republic”. He would go on to be part of Le Pen’s 2017 presidential campaign and thereafter, supported by her, was raised through the ranks to the leadership.

In the course of that rise, he has learned how to enthuse his own supporters. I bore witness to his abilities when, at a Fête de la Nation in Le Havre on 1 May this year, he declared his party had the ability to govern France “tomorrow”, before he gestured for the audience to rise. Unbidden, they broke into a chorus of the Marseillaise. He continued in his speech, excoriating Macron — then at a low ebb in popularity — and at the end, they sang the Marseillaise again.

But he is also more than capable of taking the fight to his opponents. In August, Macron sought to regain the domestic initiative with a 12-hour discussion with all the party leaders, lasting until 3am. Bardella, in a near 15-minute exchange with the President, reportedly pressed him strongly for better security, stronger controls on migrants and a referendum on the public’s views on immigration — a demand which was met with a neutral response. Along with the other participants (though more politely than those from the Left contingent), he later expressed disappointment that the marathon deliberation had led nowhere.

This is typical of him and the modern RN: committed social conservatism and nationalism, but without the sulphur of Jean-Marie. Bardella doesn’t like same-sex marriage, but when in power, he says he would not ban it, nor tamper with more recent trans legislation. He would, however, refuse access to social services for illegal immigrants: like many in the working or lower-middle class everywhere, low wages and shortage of money have sharpened his eyes for diversion of public money into what are seen as underserving pockets. “My family,” he has said, “didn’t follow politics. If I’m active politically, it’s because I saw injustice very early social: at the end of the month, my mother didn’t have more than €15.”

Maréchal is cut from a different cloth — not just in birth and upbringing, but also in the way in which she has played the hand dealt to her. From the moment of her birth, she became a scion of a family which, uniquely among the far-Right parties of Europe, is a dynasty as well as a centre of activism and ideology. Her father Samuel was close to Jean-Marie, acting as his head of communication when the former leader was still in his prime in the Nineties and early 2000s and who, in his five attempts to win the presidency, positioned himself as the only politician who fully endorsed “a France of national patriotism” — a claim often spiced with derogatory comments about Jews.

Jean Marie led the Front National until he passed over the presidency to Marine in 2011, when Maréchal was 22. After her father separated from her mother in 2007, she remained close to her grandfather. A member of the RN, and a member of the Assembly in 2012 when it had few far-Right members, Maréchal joined the party’s executive board and was talked of as a future presidential candidate. But in 2018, after losing a regional election in the south of France, she retired from active politics and founded a college (the Institute of Social Sciences, Economics and Politics) in Lyon. From 2019, however, she was seen accompanying the well-known Right-wing journalist Éric Zemmour, who founded his party Reconquête as a direct competitor on the far-Right to RN. In 2022 — endorsed by Maréchal, who made her apostasy from the Le Pen family public — he came fourth in the first round of the presidential election.

The split with her aunt was a bitter one: resigning from the RN, she said that Le Pen had brought about “incessant ideological and programme changes… [which showed a] lack of logic and vision”. Le Pen, clearly distressed, said the decision was “brutal, violent and painful”. But this ideological split had been brewing for some time, a product of Marine Le Pen’s attempts to moderate her party. When she fired her father Jean-Marie from the party in 2015 — after he said the Holocaust gas chambers were a “detail” of history and that France should unite with Russia to save the “white world” — Maréchal did not follow her aunt’s lead, failing to condemn her grandfather.

Her social conservatism has more in common with her grandfather than her aunt. A strict Catholic (she has been on at least one pilgrimage, in 2018, from Notre Dame cathedral to Lourdes), she sees Islam as a dangerous opponent to her certain idea of France. She has said that, as a mother of two girls, “the prospect of them growing up tomorrow in a country where the veil and the abaya [a loose-fitting Middle-Eastern female dress] are a daily issue, a country that is shaped by the destruction wrought by riots, rapes, and gratuitous murders committed by illegal immigrants, is a prospect that makes me despair”. Marine Le Pen, who also warns constantly of the Islamist menace, would be unlikely to use such language.

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Yet while Maréchal emerges as someone determined to succeed in the far-Right political milieu, she has shown less consistency in pursuing her goal than Bardella, a trait which may mar her leadership. The young man from the Drancy housing estate has been rock-like in his attachment to Le Pen, a careful study and practitioner of stump rhetoric, with a self-confidence which allows him to happily battle the President of France. This will be an asset going forward — Marine Le Pen was demolished by Macron on economic issues in the presidential debate of 2017.

In her affection for her grandfather, her conservative Catholicism, and her alliance with Zemmour (who attributes France’s decline to feminism and egalitarianism, and has been convicted of incitement of hate against Muslims), Maréchal presents herself as on the harder, older Right than Bardella. He has worked diligently to be where he is now, and retains a sense of the unfairness of lower-class life, which neither Zemmour nor Maréchal appear to share. And his seriousness in political debate appears to have impressed Macron — who reportedly told aides that “he was the only one of the party [of opposition leaders] who understood what the exercise was about and who really worked on preparing for it”.

Yet for all the popularity and abilities of their protégés, Marine Le Pen and Éric Zemmour have made a gamble in promoting them. Firstly, because these bright young things will likely still struggle to do as well as their elders expect; and secondly, because, for all their rhetorical and political strengths, they remain short of experience at the head of a sustained and brutal political battle. Their calibre will be tested next June, in the European elections: after which, should they survive at the top, they will meet an ordeal by fire in the presidential elections. Still, youth will have its fling, as the song from The Mikado goes — and, whether or not they make it to the top, this particular dalliance promises to shake Europe in the years to come.

At a political rally in the Normandy port town of Le Havre, an elderly man with flowing white hair and beard waves a tricolour gently in my face. On it is written “Ni Fascio, ni BoBo [bourgeois bohemian, akin to radical chic], mais Patriot”. It’s a neat triangulation, intended to paint his party, Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National, as the sensible, “love-my-country” alternative to mainstream politics. Less subtle are the party T-shirts worn by the RN Jeunesse (members under 30), which bark the slogan: “Nous n’avons pas fini d’etre Francais!” Rassemblement are on the march, spurred by the collapse in President Macron’s domestic authority after his pension reform devolved into a festival of protest and violence. They believe that, after decades spent as political outsiders, they can lead the next French government.

The challenge posed by the European New Right is now too insistent to ignore. In the last year, it has won an election in Italy and joined a government in Sweden. Alongside the established administrations in Poland and Hungary, which share its stances on immigration, globalisation and social morality, a new bloc of national dissent inside the European Union is emerging. It would be greatly augmented if Marine Le Pen, the architect of the modern Rassemblement and its co-leader, wins the presidential election in 2027. And she is leading recent polls.

Le Pen has long understood that she can only win if she can present the party as cleansed of extremism, racism and, above all, antisemitism. Performative sanitisation has been the project of her leadership since 2011. And that included clearing out her father, Jean-Marie, now 94, and changing the party name associated with him (Front National) in 2018. When Jean-Marie reached the second, decisive round of the presidential in 2002 against the centre-Right Jacques Chirac, the 82% who re-elected Chirac — including many on the Left — repeated (with scorn) the slogan: “Better to vote for a crook than a fascist!” Jean-Marie was certainly something like a fascist, and harboured a pronounced hatred of Jews. When he referred to the Holocaust as “a detail”, his daughter finally threw him out of the party. Since then, it has reached the cusp of power — two presidential final round contests against Emmanuel Macron, in which it increased its vote from 33.9% in 2017 to 41.5% in 2022.

Last Monday, Rassemblement choreographed the rally in Le Havre to toast its opponent’s misfortune. The event was a Mayday Fête de la Nation, involving 1,500 party members drawn from across France. Hosted in a large modern hall overlooking the harbour, and seated at long tables radiating out from a central stage, the party faithful were treated to a leisurely lunch of duck terrine, and glasses of kir and red wines. The real treat, however, came in the form of two speeches by the party’s joint-leaders who encapsulate its cross-generational appeal — 53-year-old Marine Le Pen and 27-year-old Jordan Bardella. Having joined the party at 16, Bardella is a political prodigy and protégé of Le Pen. Aged just 19, he became the party’s local secretary for the département Seine-Saint-Denis, a poor suburb north of Paris that is important for Rassemblement because of its long association with the working-class Left. He is now President of the party, while Le Pen leads its 89 parliamentary deputies in the Assemblée Nationale.

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Bardella followed Le Pen onto the stage as the lunch was ending, and roused the audience into an enthusiastic peal of applause and vigorous flag-waving (each table was issued with a stack of petites tricoloures). “La politique,” Le Pen began, “est un acte d’amour”: and love was the focus of her speech, love of her nation’s villages, of its people, of France itself, and above all of its sovereignty, of its freedom to be what it has ever been, “grande et belle”. Yet, in a more melancholy register, she articulated the catastrophes which had befallen it: “chaos become endemic, an atmosphere of exhaustion, of violence rising up from nowhere”. Her solutions: ending the flow of migrants, preserving the ecology of France through an end to globalisation, and conquering the subtle enemy within, “wokeisme”, which threatened “the end of thousands of years of history and of culture”.

Bardella, as fluent and passionate as his patronne — to whom, in his first public speech as party president, he made both a verbal and a physical bow — was given the glad duty of a frontal attack on Macron. This avatar of a failed liberalism, Bardella said, was responsible for the suffering of the French, for the crumbling of public services, for the degradation of France’s history. Imagine, he begged his audience — their repast complete, now waving their tricolours almost without pause — a country “where every Frenchman and French woman were living under the same flag, the same language, the same culture”. As his voice rose in fervour, he gestured for the audience to rise, and they did, breaking into the Marseillaise — “Allons, enfants de la Patrie!”

Rassemblement is now substantially in tune with French public opinion on Left and Right. The daily Figaro, on the centre-Right, carried an editorial the day before the Fête which remarked that “the polls show that the French are no longer listening to the government”, adding that, after she failed to push Macron’s pension reform through parliament, “the Prime Minister [Élisabeth Borne] and the President are no longer on the same wavelength”. Le Monde, which leans Left and has a habit of quoting liberal intellectuals, hosted the historian Pierre Rosanvallon, who saw a population “united by being held in contempt” (by Macron), and said the French are reminding him: “We are there, we exist, you can’t make us shut up.” And Dominique Strauss-Kahn, whose political career took him to the top of the IMF (from which a sex scandal ejected him), has said that Macron’s mistake was to push for an extension of the working life at a time when the French had other problems. The general sense in the French public sphere is that raising the pension age might be a good idea, but now is not the time to do it.

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The combined Left, quarrelsomely united under the umbrella organisation La France Insoumise (France Unbowed) and led by the 71-year-old radical socialist Jean-Luc Mélenchon, also sees the turbulence as an opportunity for political transformation. Speaking in Paris at a Mayday demonstration, Mélenchon shouted that, “We have had no master since 1789 but the people themselves … The solemn appeal I bring to you is: ‘Never give up!’ Nothing, never. The struggle continues.” A little way away, before Paris’s city hall, a prominent young Insoumise deputy, Antoine Léaument, was giving the media what they craved: a direct call to a revolution. “We must nourish the flame of this kind of revolutionary moment, right up to July 14th (Bastille day).” Mélenchon also mentioned the talismanic date, on which, Léaument believes, the world will be turned upside down, and witness “a great coming together of social revolt … Our sole limit will be an attack on the physical integrity of individuals.”

At the same time, on a stage 200 kilometres away, Bardella was claiming the votes of the workers for Rassemblement, calling Mélenchon “the past” and curtly dismissing the Left as “irresponsible, with no plan for France”.  And, though over 50% of France now votes for the hard Left or the hard Right, Insoumise is wracked by internal disputes. L’Express magazine recently carried a poll which showed that Mélenchon himself was substantially less popular than a likely challenger, the 47-year-old journalist and Insoumise deputy for La Somme, François Ruffin. With such dissent, Mélenchon’s momentum and command seem unstable, and any leadership struggle will only benefit Le Pen.

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When Bardella and Le Pen descended from the stage, signalling the closing of the Fête, they could barely move for half an hour, besieged by autograph-seekers, selfie-snappers and endless handshakes. Every so often, before departing the hall, groups would strike up chants of “Marine President, Marine President!” The speeches were a reminder that the purpose of this party is not merely to move a little to the Left or to the Right while preserving the same social order, but to bring that order to a close.

The uncompromising and emotive patriotism of  Le Pen and Bardella encases a nationalist politics against which Macron has fought through all of his first five presidential years. But, as his internationalist project has faltered, he has had to reckon with the ardent attachment of many French towards the Patrie of which they are enfants — and not the borderless European Union which he has seemed to prioritise. Rassemblement have bet that the French people will reject his cosmopolitanism outright — and, more crucially, that they will judge the party sufficiently cleansed of its fascist taint for it to govern.

The Rally, the wisdom went, still operated like a family clan, even though Marine had fired her own father, the Front National’s founder, after he made one anti-Semitic joke too many. It looked to the past while Zemmour looked to the future, bringing together Marine’s own niece Marion Maréchal and former Sarkozystas from the hard fringes of Les Républicains, the Centre-Right party descended from the Gaullist movement. Le Pen was a spent name in French politics.

Fast forward to this week, however, the last before the first round of the Presidential election on Sunday, and Marine Le Pen is polling at 23% against Emmanuel Macron’s 26%. She is up two points and he’s down four in ten days — and, incredibly, the same poll credits her with 48.5% against Macron’s 51.5% for the 24 April run-off.

“This is well within the margin of error. There are configurations in which she could win,” says the political analyst Stéphane Rozès, who has advised every French President since Mitterrand. Bruno Jeanbart, the vice president of Opinionway, another pollster, concurs. “It’s harder to predict the run-off, mostly because voters don’t yet know how they will decide in reaction to the first-round results. But it’s no longer impossible.”

What explains Marine Le Pen’s extraordinary comeback from the political graveyard? Her platform hasn’t essentially changed: she still wants to reduce all immigration into France by 75%, and to create a legal discrimination between French nationals and foreign residents in their access to public jobs, benefits, and even private sector jobs. But she has softened it. Not only does she no longer advocate France’s exit from the EU, she has given up on leaving the Euro.

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She wants to abolish Jus Solis, birthright citizenship, to deny naturalisation to the children of foreign parents born in France, but has given up on banning double nationality. She no longer wants a return to the death penalty, which she advocated as late as 2012. As for gay marriage, voted through during the François Hollande presidency, she prudently suggests “a three-year moratorium”, which means in effect it’s no longer in question. (In all fairness, Marine Le Pen has always been a social liberal; old Front hands used to bemoan her “gay Mafia” of advisers a decade ago.) And while she recommended leaving Nato before the Ukraine-Russian war, she has since rowed this back to merely pulling out France from Nato’s integrated command.

So far, so Souverainiste — and often hard to differentiate from the historic wing of the Gaullist party that defined itself in opposition to the 1992 Maastricht Treaty.

In 2017, Le Pen, a barrister by trade, had miserably crashed and burned during her single debate with Macron between the two rounds. She came unprepared, got names and figures wrong, even had to look at her notes mid-sentence. Facing her, Macron, a former top mandarin at the Ministry of Finance, reeled off his facts and talking points with the condescending smile of a younger man who’s passed all of his exams with flying colours. (He actually didn’t: intimates say his own lasting personal trauma was flunking twice the entry to the elite literary École Normale Supérieure.) Macron, the newcomer, didn’t necessarily come across as sympathique, but he looked a lot more competent than Le Pen. When she realised how badly she’d done, she reportedly spent two days locked at home in a funk before limping back to campaign for the last days.

She always knew she would run again: what else, after all, can someone called Le Pen do? She had been advised, sometimes haphazardly, by a motley group of some 80 senior civil servants, CEOs, Énarques, lawyers and former SpAds who took to calling themselves Les Horaces, from early Roman history, and disagreed as much among themselves as they did with the party faithful. When she started preparing her 2022 campaign, she halved the number of Horaces. She brought in new faces and tightened discipline under her 36-year-old chief of staff, Renaud Labaye, a former Army officer who attended HEC Business school before joining the Ministry of Finance. They are the ones who worked on her current manifesto — as well as drilled her for the probable rerun of the pre-runoff debate, which Le Pen has sworn to herself she will win this time.

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Last week Le Monde ran a three-page analysis that tried to “decode” Le Pen’s platform to demonstrate that she was still, in effect, a fascist threat. Its main proof was her promise, if she’s elected, to organise an early referendum on an immigration and national identity bill; a bill passed in this way legally needs not be examined by the Constitutional Council. The constitutional lawyer Dominique Rousseau was quoted calling it “un coup d’état” — even though the recourse to referenda was introduced by Charles de Gaulle in his Fifth Republic Constitution in 1958 (it was used twice by Le Général, and seven times since).

Similarly, her projected measures “against Islamist ideology” differ less from those adopted by Nicolas Sarkozy, François Hollande or Macron (in his recent Bill against Separatism, for instance) than from Zemmour’s blanket claim that “it’s Islam, not just Islamism, that’s against the values of the Republic”. (He tried to walk back on this last week, telling 100,000 Parisian supporters that he had no problem with “assimilated Islam in France”.) Even Valérie Pécresse sounded harder during her ill-fated Paris rally a month ago: “It’s time to stop denying the link between terrorism and immigration.”

“Accusations [like Le Monde’s] help Marine Le Pen more than they hurt her,” says Jean-Yves Camus, France’s leading expert on domestic and international far-Right movements. “Rightly or wrongly, people compare her style — seemingly reasonable, becalmed — to Eric Zemmour’s; as well as her lack of ego to most of her competitors. She owned up to mistakes. She admitted that her niece Marion’s defection had hurt her, explaining she’d largely brought her up as a child. She has become humanised.”

Camus compares Le Pen’s platform to the Italian academic Emilio Gentile’s ten-point list characterising a fascist movement. These include the doctrine of taking power by force, having a paramilitary arm, aspiring to a monopoly of power, territorial ambitions, and more. “Simply put, the RN isn’t a fascist party,” Camus says.

Of all this year’s women candidates — the centre-Right Valérie Pécresse, the Socialist Anne Hidalgo, the Trotskyite Nathalie Arthaud, and Le Pen — it is the latter who has made the fewest formal feminist statements. And yet Le Pen, 53, is the one most perceived by public opinion surveys as having womanly, even motherly traits. These include being an avowed cat lady: she has passed a breeder licence to be able to mate her Bengals; once weaned, she gives the kittens away “to good homes” among her friends. It’s telling that besides her political Instagram account, which has 223,000 followers and 916 posts, she has a private locked one, to which she’s only admitted 166 followers, but where she’s posted 3,759 photos of her feline tribe, and none of herself.

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All of which makes her, on paper at least, a complementary figure to Zemmour — if they got along, that is. He appeals to more affluent and educated voters, to urbanites, and to the Southern départements of Languedoc-Roussillon and Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur; but he fails with women (61% of his avowed voters are men). Le Pen’s strongholds, in contrast, are in France’s rust belt in the North and North-East, in any area of la France Périphérique, those small towns where businesses, public services and jobs have disappeared, and with women (55% to 45% men). He rouses his large audiences with old-fashioned flings of nationalist rhetoric; she comforts the members of her smaller gatherings and doesn’t shy from sharing her troubles with them.

Both have been unpardonably soft on Vladimir Putin — Zemmour because he has no foreign policy experience and relied on advisers whose rabid anti-Americanism fed their Russophilia; Le Pen because her party’s coffers are perennially empty and she twice had to beg for loans from Russian-owned banks based in Budapest, having been denied credit by virtue-signalling French banks. Ukraine harmed him much more than her, as he stuck to his positions for a long week, initially refusing the idea of welcoming Ukrainian refugees in France; while she condemned the invasion after a couple of days, calling Russia “the aggressor” and welcoming refugees.

Cunningly crafted or simply reflecting Le Pen’s real nature — but probably a bit of both — her new image gives her a unique strength in these days of defiance against professional politicians: she looks both sincere and somewhat reassuring. Every expert, starting with her own father, said she would lose out by trying to rebuild the renamed National Rally as a less aggressive force — her own expression was “detoxifying” it. Yet the advent of Zemmour was evidently a boon: as an abrasive candidate appealing to an energised base, but turning off less radicalised voters who nonetheless reject the traditional politicians on offer, he in effect completed her political “detox”.

But most of all, Marine Le Pen has been helped by Emmanuel Macron. Discontented voters chose him five years ago to spite the other, older, hackneyed candidates — a populist reflex for a man who used populist means for decidedly non-populist policies. His victory was built on the cold-eyed destruction of traditional political parties Left and Right, and he never stopped to consider the effect on public life. He cherry-picked the most compatible and the most docile personalities from both the Socialists and the Républicains, gave them seats in the House and Cabinet, stringently barred them from having any kind of independent views, and declared himself as being neither Left nor Right.

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Like the spoiled child he has been for all 44 years of his charmed life, political and personal, Macron has never had to face consequences for his decisions; for him, turning the French Republic into an atomised wasteland of individuals matters not one bit. (He will be remembered as the Houellebecq President.) Under his presidency, France was shaken by popular revolts such as the Gilets Jaunes who felt no one was representing them in a country of weak unions and even weaker parties. His handling of the Covid crisis wasn’t much worse than that of any other government, but it was characterised by a range of baroque and contradictory measures, always presented as the réalité du moment, without ever acknowledging what had come before.

In recent weeks, possessed by his self-appointed mission as peacemaker in Ukraine, Macron felt safe enough to swerve campaigning altogether, loftily letting his spin doctors explain he was “held up” by more serious matters; he saw himself as the statesman, the others were mere candidates. His early attempts were certainly sincere and could have been useful, but he was slow in recognising the intractable nature of Vladimir Putin and the sheer scale of the most dangerous conflict on European soil since the end of the Second World War.

By April, voters felt it. He may yet save his job between now and 24 April — but if the French decide to vote for a middle-aged, not-so-scary cat lady, who seems to offer simple solutions to complicated problems, he will have only himself to blame.

The French are decreasingly guarded about exposing their dislike of the emerging demography of France — where a large and growing North African population inhabits suburban rings around the tiny cores of many historic cities from the Mediterranean to the Channel. I thought of my hostess from 40 years ago when travelling with my wife near Rheims last year. Our hotelier, a woman with an elegant home and her own family mark of champagne, told us enthusiastically about the wonderful Monsieur Zemmour, an intellectual writer and broadcaster who had not at that stage declared himself as a presidential candidate but who she thought might just save France.

Arriving in the village in the Pyrenees Orientales where we spend much of our time, we heard the same from our elderly, highly cultivated neighbour and an artisan friend of hers. Of course, neither would actually vote for Zemmour if he stood, they assured us (not entirely convincingly), but he was very impressive. And had we noticed the first veils arriving in the nearest town and occasionally in the village itself?

This is a region that Pepin and his son Charlemagne captured from the Moors in the late ninth century, a fact attested to by a series of local Romanesque chapels dating from the following two centuries. Our neighbour and her friend felt they were witnessing a reversal of the Carolingian handiwork: an area once wrested from the Muslims by the Christians was being wrested back, not through warfare but through migration and a higher birth rate.

The French have long been obsessed by demography — and with good reason. When Napoleon dominated the continent early in the nineteenth century, his population was at least half as large as Britain’s — even including Ireland — and also half as large again as what was to become Germany. In its glory — in the seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries — France was Europe’s population behemoth.

But whereas in the century before the outbreak of the First World War, France’s population grew from around 30 to around 40 million, Britain’s rose from around 25 million to around 45 million, despite the massive emigration by which people of British origin had settled vast swathes of the globe, from California to Tasmania. Over the same period, not only was Germany unified, but its population rose from a little over 20 million to around 65 million. Industrialisation was also slower in France than in Britain or Germany, in part due to the lack of raw materials; the best iron deposits were lost to the Germans with Lorraine. But it was a lack of manpower which proved decisive, whether in the factories or at the front.

It was clear long before the bloodiest battles on the western front that France was a second-rate power dependent on British and Russian allies just to hold its own. The defeat of 1870 at the hands of the Prussians and their allies was a national trauma; the ignominy of the lost lands beyond the ligne bleu of Alsace and Lorraine were deeply etched on French consciousness. And population — or lack of it — was blamed. As early as 1849, a French parliamentary deputy saw national decline as rooted in demography: “The first element of power is population, and on this point … France is in full decay.” By the time of the outbreak of war in 1914, more than half of French parliamentarians were members of the Parliamentary Group for the Protection of Natality. French family sizes had shrunk long before those of other European powers, for reasons till not entirely clear. We know enough to understand that the cause was a comparatively low birth rate, though, rather than a high death rate: perhaps the French peasants figured out how to limit their procreation earlier than people elsewhere.

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But if defeat in the Franco-Prussian war excited a demographic alarm, the travails of 1914-1918 turned the problem into a source of despair. French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau may have got a lot of what he wanted in the Treaty of Versailles in terms of punishing Germany, but he declared: “The treaty does not say that France must undertake to have children but it is the first clause which should have been included in it … One can take all of Germany’s guns, one can do whatever one likes, France will be lost because there is no more Frenchman.”

Inter-war, the French made efforts to boost their numbers. Prolific mothers were offered medals. The Alliance pour l’Accroissement de la Population française advocated larger families. It also supported immigration of Europeans, ideally Catholics, who could be absorbed into the French nation. Hundreds of thousands of Poles, Belgians and Italian came to live in France between the wars; France had a foreign-born population three times as large as the UK’s in the 1930s (almost six times if the Irish are excluded from the UK figure).

And yet, in 1937 Paul Reynaud, a minister and later prime minister, still lamented: “There is a single factor which dominates everything: the demographic factor. Forty-one million Frenchmen face sixty-seven million Germans and forty-three million Italians, these last two countries linked by the Berlin-Rome axis.… As far as numbers are concerned, we are beaten.” Germany’s fertility rate had plummeted as well, but the enemy over the Rhine was still far too numerous for France to compete. Population pessimism was a critical component in the general atmosphere which led to the collapse of 1940.

After the Second World War, things looked up — demographically and in every other way. France had its own baby boom, moderate though it was, and although fertility rates have fallen in recent decades, they are still higher than in most other European countries, not least Germany. A residue of Catholicism as well as an atmosphere conducive to women combining parenthood with a career seem to have helped.

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The French population also swelled with the arrival of people from the former colonies, first the pieds noirs fleeing the conflict in Algeria, then Algerian Muslims and migrants from the once vast French Empire south of the Sahara. But here lay the rub. Earlier migrant groups had been quite easily absorbed. In the Pyrenees Orientales, for example, hundreds of thousands of Spaniards fled Franco’s advance in 1939, and today their descendants have completely merged with the locals who share their Catalan identity. But although France’s republican and secular ideology demurs from formally categorising citizens, those from more distant cultures have not integrated to the same extent.

That’s not to say that France completely failed in its efforts to absorb this new wave of immigrants. A survey from, admittedly 17 years ago, showed Muslims in France much more likely to identify primarily with their nation than with their religion — when compared with those in Germany, Spain and the UK — and more likely to hold favourable views of Christians and Jews.

But, since then, France has suffered particularly acutely from Islamist terrorism. The attacks on the Bataclan and the Charlie Hebdo offices are just the most notorious examples; similar incidents in a Jewish school and a supermarket, as well as the murder of a teacher offending Islamic sensibilities, have angered and stirred up the country. Around half of French Muslims report experiencing discrimination and two thirds believe their religion is negatively perceived by their fellow citizens.

Moreover, though the French state avoids and in some cases bans the collection of data by religion or ethnicity, there is plenty of evidence — both anecdotal and statistical — that French Muslims are more prone to deprivation and unemployment than their non-Muslim fellow citizens.

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Now, the political rhetoric around French demography is as charged as it was 100 years ago. Today the worry comes not from across the Rhine but from over the Mediterranean. A demographic pessimism hangs over France much as it did back when Reynaud despaired in the face of a larger German population. More than 60% of French people believe that white Christians will be rendered extinct by Muslims. There is talk of lost suburbs where women and men are increasingly separated in public. A French journalist who worked on a story of no-go Islamic zones recently received death threats and is under police protection. Around 20 retired generals have warned that Islam is taking over parts of the country and have raised the possibility of a racially-driven civil war.

In this febrile atmosphere, it is small wonder that two of the leading candidates in the fast-approaching presidential election are explicitly anti-Islam. Zemmour has said he is standing “to save France from Islam” and has called on Muslims to abandon their religion. Marine Le Pen has proposed a headscarf ban and compared Muslims praying in the street with the Nazi occupation. Not to be outdone, the centre has followed the lead of the Right: President Macron has vowed to fight “Islamic separatism” and his interior minister has taken an activist line in controlling Muslim political associations. Although the Left is generally more sympathetic to minorities, it has a strong tradition of secularism (laïcité) which often rubs up against Muslim practice.

The consensus is that Macron and his associates will succeed in stealing the thunder of the two far-Right candidates and that he will emerge as the clear winner. Despite the enthusiasm of my interlocutors last year, Zemmour seems to be sinking while Le Pen rises. She will have to do much better in debates with Macron than she did in 2017 if she is to stand a chance of not being trounced; Macron’s superior intellect counts a lot with the French, who are unapologetic about their respect for brain power.

But bear this in mind: when Le Pen’s father faced Jacques Chirac in the second round in 2002, the far-Right candidate received just 18% of the vote; 15 years later, his daughter got almost 34%. In a France once more obsessed by its own demographic decline, the unthinkable is increasingly becoming thinkable; the unsayable becoming sayable. Nothing can be discounted.

Although he was technically convicted for treason under Article 75 of the pre-war penal code, everyone grasped that the cocky, clever and pro-fascist editor, columnist and novelist faced the squad essentially thanks to his “crimes of opinion” on platforms such as the noxious anti-Semitic paper Je Suis Partout. From judges and civil servants to industrialists, battalions of high-powered collaborators saved their skins. Brasillach, about whom Simone de Beauvoir later argued that “there are words as murderous as gas chambers”, served as an iconic scapegoat during France’s post-liberation Purge — and proof that his country still took the written word with deadly seriousness. As his biographer Alice Kaplan puts it: “Writers knew that words counted in a court of law. This was both an intimidating and an empowering knowledge: they mattered.”

In France, they still can. Cut to spring 2022. Another wittily provocative right-wing writer — no, never a fascist and, as a Jew, no anti-Semite either — stands consistently at third place in the polls ahead of April’s presidential elections. In the wake of the Ukraine war, Éric Zemmour — until late February a loud Putin admirer — has a microscopically small chance of progress to the second round of voting on 24 April. Probably, his rival Marine Le Pen will carry the hard-Right’s standard into the run-off. If so, she will suffer a steamroller defeat at the hands of Emmanuel Macron — with, as in 2017, an ominously high toll of abstentions.

Although destined to fail, Zemmour’s campaign has proved his ability to convert decades of mordant fringe polemics into a sustained grip on 12-15% of the electorate. The ideas-driven reactionary nationalism voiced by Brasillach and his collaborationist peers did not die in the chilly courtyard of the Montrouge fort. Zemmour, by the way, has sought to exonerate the Vichy regime and its figurehead, Marshal Pétain. He has argued that it worked to protect French Jews while sending their non-citizen co-religionists to the death camps.

You can hardly sanction ideas more sternly than by shooting their champions. In France, though, mystic and militant nationalism is the repressed that always returns. Far-Right activism with a literary or philosophical tinge has coloured French politics at least since the Dreyfus Affair convulsed the country in the 1890s. Zemmour merely fronts the latest edition of a well-thumbed publication.

Its features do change. Notably, hostility to Muslim migration has neatly filled the yawning space occupied for so long by anti-Semitism. Still, the editorial line robustly endures. Alien powers have corrupted the true genius of France, abetted by a traitorous liberal and cosmopolitan elite. Formal citizenship granted as an empty, bureaucratic right has supplanted the affinities of blood, soil, language and culture that should define the nation. French identity itself is in grave peril. Behind the changing face of the enemy within — Jews, Protestants and Freemasons a century ago, Muslims and other non-white incomers now — stands the omnipotent malice of global finance. In France, hard-Right and far-Left may enjoy tearing each other apart. They can readily agree a truce on the demonic iniquity of “Anglo-Saxon” capitalism.

Le Grand Remplacement, a 2011 polemic by the prolific novelist-turned-activist Renaud Camus, functions almost as the Communist Manifesto for this newest wave of the nativist Right — and a rhetorical cornerstone of Zemmour’s campaign. Long ago, Camus was a scandalous gay icon thanks to outspoken fiction such as Tricks (published with a preface by Roland Barthes). Recently, he has seen his nebulous theory that a top-down strategy of “replacement” aims to substitute the native-born French population with an alien army of non-white, non-Christian incomers go viral, and go global. It reached the American alt-Right by the time of the fatal Charlottesville riots of 2017. A few weeks back,  Zemmour’s centre-right rival Valérie Pécresse uttered the trigger phrase during a stump speech.

Read Le Grand Remplacement, though, and you soon grasp that its allure lies not in reasoning or evidence — beyond the gut feelings of the author — but in the impact of a few key images. It displays the craft of a rhetorician of visceral, subjective experience. But for Camus, race has now replaced sex as the transmission-belt of fear and desire. Camus is haunted (obsessed, indeed) by the figure a veiled woman on a TV chat show. Despite “speaking our language badly, knowing nothing of our culture and, more seriously, overflowing with vindictiveness and animosity, not to say hate, towards our history and our civilisation”, she can sit there and say pleasantly that “I’m as French as you are” (my translation). “If this woman is right,” Camus continues, “being French is nothing: it’s a mockery, a failed joke gone sad, a rubber-stamp on an official document”. He declines to mention the colonial history, with its incorporation of overseas possessions as parts of France itself, that the “I’m as French as you” claim legitimately reflects.

Camus, like his imitators, longs to reclaim an uncomplicated sense of national pride. He speaks in the plangent, self-pitying terms that run like a streak of bitter tears through the language of the French right. “I’ve a nostalgia,” he frankly admits, “for a simple, self-evident belonging, which isn’t perpetually forced to interrogate itself.” These days, however, being French has to be “as ‘problematic’, as ambiguous, as being Belgian”. Self-evidently, no fate could be worse than a Belgian’s…

Camus’s imagery revives a crucial ideological distinction between the “pays legal” of abstract, bloodless state rules and the “pays réel” of authentic identity and belonging. That polarity has driven the cultural right in France ever since Charles Maurras headed the Action Française movement at the turn of the 20th century. This deep flow of what we might call French Powellism (Camus himself has introduced a translation of Powell’s “Rivers of blood” speech) long preceded modern Fascism. It merged with the Fascist mainstream in the Vichy era, and paid the price after the Liberation. Tried in Lyon, the elderly Maurras escaped the firing squad in 1945 but got a life sentence for his collaborationist record.

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Famously, Maurras cried as he stepped down from the court: “It’s the revenge of Dreyfus.” Yet the revenge proved incomplete. After the Purge, the Maurras current of ideas resumed its winding but still-influential course. De Gaulle’s shrewd and robust formula for a presidential monarchy managed both to channel and neutralise it. Nativist thought retreated to the noisy margins of “New Right” philosophy and journalism until Jean-Marie Le Pen and his clan brought France-for-the-French activism back into the electoral spotlight. Le Pen senior has honoured both Brasillach himself — and the Resistance fighters who sought his execution.

The great French gloom of the Noughties, its “declinist” spirit exported globally thanks to the morose satires of Michel Houellebecq, cleared plenty of space not just for the prix fixe populism of Le Pen. It boosted the more upmarket gourmet menu on offer from Renaud Camus, Zemmour and the media-friendly philosopher, Alain Finkielkraut. So Zemmour’s political ascent drew fuel from decades of renewed attacks on multicultural modernity.

Older reactionaries often claimed to be saving the inclusive revolutionary ideals of 1789 from later deviations. In spite of his roots in a Jewish Algerian family, Zemmour has changed course. He has sailed on the tide of nativist feeling as it turned from civic towards ethnic nationalism. His 2022 manifesto scorns the idea of a hybrid, hyphenated or cross-cultural national identity. It insists that “if it is possible to assimilate individuals, it is not possible to assimilate peoples”. In this perspective, multiculturalism can never speak French. In his superbly lucid study of cross-Channel cultural habits, How the French Think, Sudhir Hazareesingh notes that Finkielkraut and his comrades show “how far the declinist obsession has pushed French thought away from its Rousseauist and republican heritage”. Once more, blood, not paper, counts above all.

For sure, the national populism of Le Pen père exploited working-class fears about non-European — above all, North African — migration. As does that of Le Pen fille. Yet a strain of republican universalism marked their movements. I recall, in the early Nineties, reporting on a Front National rally in Nice and noticing the genuine cheers that greeted his local Maghrebian, Caribbean and Indo-Chinese supporters as Le Pen welcomed them on stage. Stooges, maybe — but the inclusive optics mattered.

Zemmour, in contrast, has stirred up the ancient soup of salon prejudice that nourished Maurras, Brasillach and their ilk. Don’t dismiss his appeal as a mere side-show of the plebeian resentment felt in left-behind provincial towns. Posh racism, gussied up in intellectual fashion, has lurked in the background of French cultural life since the anti-Dreyfusard heyday of Maurras and his colleague Maurice Barrès. Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu supplies an acidly witty running commentary on the rise and fall of anti-Dreyfus opinion, as the wrongly convicted Captain slowly wins his freedom.

In the aristocratic salons of Paris, being chic and well-born means sharing the reflexes of the xenophobic right. “Personally, you know that I have no racial prejudice,” burbles Proust’s super-snobbish Duc de Guermantes in The Guermantes Way, “all that sort of thing seems to me out of date… but damn it all, when one goes by the name of ‘Marquis de Saint-Loup’ one isn’t a Dreyfusard; what more can I say?” Proust shows too how smart folk will cast off once-universal prejudices like last season’s hats once they become socially embarrassing. At the work’s close, we learn that “Dreyfusism was now integrated in a scheme of respectable and familiar things. As for asking oneself whether intrinsically it was good or bad, the idea no more entered anybody’s head, now when it was accepted, than in the past when it was condemned. It was no longer shocking and that was all that mattered.”

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Zemmour and his confrères have dipped into the nativist soup that long ago nourished the anti-Dreyfusards. They have carefully extracted its now-unpalatable ingredients (anti-Semitism above all) and brought it back to a rolling boil. Since the age of Voltaire, French life has cultivated such licensed agents provocateurs on the edges of political respectability. They have duly let off fireworks from both ends of the spectrum. Blood-and-soil mavericks of the Renaud Camus or Zemmour stripe have counterparts on the left in the diehard Trotskyists and Maoists — such as veteran thinker-activist Alain Badiou — who still cast a spell. These opposites can attract, or even merge. In the 2017 election Alain de Benoist, a pillar of “New Right” philosophy since the Sixties, supported the unsinkable old-Left survivor Jean-Luc Mélenchon — the French Tony Benn, still running hard in 2022. Zemmour himself has spoken with affection of the old PCF (Communist Party) and its stalwart defence of – native-born – workers’ rights.

The theological politics of rupture and upheaval, and a contempt for liberalism, especially in its “Anglo-Saxon” guise, may solder the far ends of French thought into a sort of fraternal enmity. Their battle of ideas has, since the Revolution, often played out like an intimate civil war. Foreigners may miss this antagonistic kinship. By some weird twist of cultural and institutional history, the so-called “French theory” that came to dominate Anglo-American humanities faculties from the Seventies was imported as a unified body of progressive doctrine. Yet it had roots on the Right as well as Left. Richard Wolin’s analysis The Seduction of Unreason brilliantly lays bare the “subterranean affinities” that knotted both ends. Mainstays of the US-UK “theory” curriculum such as Maurice Blanchot and Georges Bataille had close links with what Wolin calls the “Left fascism” of the Thirties, and the cultural arms of the Vichy regime.

The defeat of 1940, and the four ensuing years of humiliation and compromise, transformed a long-standing elite game of poses and provocations into a blood-sport with actual corpses on the ground. Brasillach, the ultimate paper tiger, joined them. The war in Algeria, and its fall-out in France, did for a while prolong the real-world lethality of these ideological disputes. Then De Gaulle, and the modernised prosperity he fostered, made sure that the extremist entertainers of French culture could once again fire freely – and fire only blanks.

Zemmour, the latest heir to this tradition of high-minded outrageousness, may well fade from view after the first round of voting on 1o April. Sooner or later, another firebrand of the cerebral, nativist Right will fill his shoes. However, the genius of the De Gaulle’s republican monarchy is that the system will eventually install another effective Macron-style president: one more “technocratic” ruler whom apocalyptic right and left will agree to detest.

According to travel writer Sylvain Tesson, France is a paradise inhabited by people who think they live in hell. It can sometimes feel that way. In a country of high-quality public services and world-class social infrastructure where productivity now runs (according to Britain’s Office for National Statistics) 18% higher than in the UK, crybaby ideologues will again lament that la France profonde remains the prisoner of multi-cultural traitors and Anglo-Saxon capitalists. Back in London, meanwhile, I can pay my bus fares to the RATP (Régie autonome des transports parisiens, owner of London United and London Sovereign) and my fuel bills to Eléctricité de France. As Robert Brasillach might say, Vive la France quand même!

By 1968, he was a member of the UDR. In 1976 he was a rising young star in the RPR. He was elected in 1978 France’s youngest member of parliament, aged 27.

In 2002, he joined the newly created UMP party and was appointed foreign minister under President Jacques Chirac. In 2015, he became a member of Les Républicains — in a gap between his second stint as European Commissioner and his appointment as Monsieur Brexit, the European Union’s chief negotiator on British departure.

We speak of course of Michel Barnier, detested by British Brexiteers, admired by British Remainers. Is Barnier an ideologically adjustable Vicar of Bray, version française? No, not at all. Barnier has belonged to five parties but never changed his political coat. The Gaullist or wider centre-Right movements repeatedly altered their names and their geometry. Barnier remained loyal to all of them.

Six months before a compelling French presidential election, Michel Barnier’s party-political life-story is significant for two reasons.

Firstly, it helps to explain why Barnier has emerged as favourite to be chosen as the presidential candidate of the main French centre-Right party in a closed primary in early December. The 90,000 or so “militants” (members) of Les Républicains (LR) face a choice on 4 December between three no-hopers and three uninspiring, senior candidates, two of whom left the party four years ago. Internal polls suggest that members are turning — more in desperation than in expectation — to Barnier, a man who has always stuck by the party (whatever its name or policy du jour happened to be).

Secondly, the potted history of Barnier’s life and times also explains why Barnier, aged 70, may never be the President of the Republic. If he does become the centre-Right nominee, he could yet be the man who saves his political family from oblivion. More likely, he may be remembered as the last chieftain of a troubled, political dynasty which stretches from Charles de Gaulle to Nicolas Sarkozy.

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After decades of shape-shifting, dividing, uniting, back-stabbing, trampling spending rules, breaking the law, the French centre-Right is running out of ideological and electoral road. Part of its territory — nationalist, anti-European, anti-migration, socially conservative — was conquered years ago by Marine Le Pen. Another part, liberal socially and economically, pro-European, was annexed in 2017 by Emmanuel Macron. A further chunk of harder centre-Right opinion, more educated and better-heeled than Lepennist voters, is migrating to the xenophobic essayist and TV pundit, Eric Zemmour.

As a result, none of the leading contenders to be the Les Républicains’s candidate in the first round of the presidential election on 10 April is sure of reaching the two-candidate second round on 24 April.

Best placed in national — as opposed to internal — opinion polls is Xavier Bertrand, president of the northern French region, Hauts-de-France, followed by Valérie Pécresse, president of the greater Paris region, Ile-de-France. Michel Barnier comes a poor third — with an average of polls giving him only 11% of the Round One vote, far short of the likely 17 to 20% “entry ticket” to Round Two.

Why would LR party members vote for the “weakest” candidate nationally in their closed primary on 4 December? Is this another example of the perpetual instinct for self-harm of French small-c conservatives — once described as the “stupidest centre Right” in the world?

Possibly. Then again, the election is six months away; public opinion is relatively volatile; only 60% of those questioned offer an opinion to pollsters; and Zemmour’s rapid rise could prove as ephemeral as similar irruptions in past French presidential elections.

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Barnier’s supporters point to the fact that his candidature was mocked when he entered the race in August. He was, many pundits said, too dull, too closely associated with Brussels and too little known in France to win the centre-Right nomination. Yet two months later, he looks odds-on to be selected. According to an internal poll, Barnier is approved by 58% of LR members, Pécresse by 52%, and Bertrand by only 38%.

Other than his unbroken membership of Gaullist parties for half a century, Barnier has seduced the LR membership. He could be “our Joe Biden,” they suggest — old and underestimated. Others say that the tall, patrician-looking Barnier has “the face of a President”. In other words, he is not the bland Xavier Bertrand and he is not Valerie Pécresse; competent, likeable but undeniably and — unacceptably to many French conservatives — a woman.

Barnier has also pulled off a great coup, which could yet come back to haunt him. He has called for a referendum on whether France should suspend parts of the EU and Council of Europe treaties to allow a three to-five-year moratorium on migration (though not asylum seeking).

This was greeted by the British media — and some in France — as an act of breath-taking hypocrisy. After years of lecturing the British on the drawbacks of leaving the EU, here was Barnier suggesting that France should step outside the European treaties to “take back control” of immigration policy.

The truth is a little more complicated. Barnier’s point is that the EU has no coherent policy for external immigration and therefore national governments should have the right to create their own. As things stand, he says, the European courts interpret their respective treaties in ways that make this impossible.

The EU referendum initiative, however limited, changed Barnier’s image as an uncompromising Brussels technocrat. It gave him a role — before the rise of Zemmour — in the debate on migration which may shape the election. On both counts, it endeared Barnier to the harder line members who remain in the French centre-Right.

On other issues, however, he remains a fervent European. He called last weekend for the increased “mutualisation” of national economic policies to prevent Europe from being marginalised by China and the United States in the decades ahead.

If Barnier does win Les Républicains nomination, his apparent ambivalence on Europe will be lambasted by Zemmour, Le Pen and by some Left-wing candidates as an example of elitist group-think. The idea of a “mutualised” Europe may also jar with many members of Les Républicains. What remains of the party is close to LePennism.

The nationalist-authoritarian drift of the LR membership is sometimes compared to what happened to the US Republican party under Donald Trump or the British Conservative Party via Boris Johnson and Brexit. There are points of comparison but the battle for the soul of the French centre-Right is much older.

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In 1976, Jacques Chirac created the Rassemblement pour La République (RPR) to replace what was left of the old Gaullist movement — and as a luxury bulldozer for his personal use. The more economically liberal, socially moderate and reformist wing of the centre-Right united loosely behind President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing in an alliance called the Union pour la Democratie Francaise (UDF).

Chirac’s party was supposed to be nationalist-authoritarian and rural, socially conservative and economically interventionist. But it had a pro-European, economically liberal wing too. These two broad strands of the French centre-Right cooperated and tripped each other up for two decades. Chirac seesawed from one viewpoint to the other (while funding the RPR party by embezzling millions of francs from the Paris town hall where he was mayor).

In 2002, after Marine Le Pen’s father reached the second round of the Presidential election, Chirac skilfully exploited the crisis to merge his RPR with part of the more European-minded UDF.

This new centre-Right party (the UMP) was hijacked by Nicolas Sarkozy before his presidential victory in 2007. Like Chirac — but more energetically — Sarkozy attempted to ride the twin horses of the French centre-Right. Like Chirac, he played fast and loose with the rules. And like Chirac before him, he was sentenced to jail last month for fraudulently circumventing campaign financing laws.

The French centre-Right adores law and order — for others. The last two centre-Right French Presidents were given jail sentences for corruption. Three of the last six French centre-Right prime ministers have been convicted of criminal offences after leaving office.

This miserable record — three of the last six French centre-Right prime ministers have been convicted of criminal offences after leaving office — has left a legacy of personal loathing within the main centre-Right party to date. The party changed its name to Les Républicains in 2015 to distance itself from a damaged “UMP” brand. But two years later, the centre-Right failed to make the second round of a presidential election for the first time in the history of the Fifth Republic. After its candidate, François Fillon, was accused of fiddling his parliamentary expenses, Emmanuel Macron carved off a chunk of the “centrist-liberal-European” wing. Marine Le Pen took some of the nationalist-authoritarians.

Following Macron’s victory, the LR party membership subsided from over 200,000 to 80,000 at the start of this year. It is now 90,000 and rising. This membership surge may or may not allow Bertrand, or less likely, Pécresse, to overtake Barnier and snatch the nomination. Most people’s money is on Barnier.

If he does win, he will take on a heavy, historical responsibility. The 2022 election will be passe ou casse for the battered legacy of De Gaulle, Chirac and Sarkozy. Another failure to reach the second round will hasten the disintegration of Les Républicains. The moderate, pro-European elements will be absorbed into a Greater Macronism. The rest will merge with the far-Right.

This, I believe, is Eric Zemmour’s principal ambition: to do well enough in 2022 to destroy both the LR and Le Pen’s Rassemblement National. A new nationalist, anti-migrant, Eurosceptic movement could then emerge before the next Presidential election in 2027.

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Barnier could, however, still prevent the destruction of the movement that he has served since the age of 14. He — or whoever becomes the centre-Right candidate — still has a slim chance of being elected President of the Republic. As things stand, far-Right rivals Le Pen and Zemmour are jostling for second position in the first round on 17% to 20%. The top place seems likely to go to President Macron, whose first-round support is stable on 23-27%.

The second place in Round Two on 24 April could be a three-way lottery until the last moment. Le Pen and Zemmour could cancel each other out and reduce the entry score to something in the high teens — reachable by Barnier, or another Gaullist.

If either Marine Le Pen or Eric Zemmour qualifies for Round Two, Macron will crush them. The Left and Greens, with around 30% of the vote split seven ways in Round One, will not vote for the far-Right in Round Two. Some will abstain. Most will grumble and vote for Macron.

If Barnier, or another centre-Right candidate, sneaks into Round Two, the result could be very close. Many Left and Green voters loathe Macron. They would vote to dump him on 24 April — and then loathe the new centre-Right president the next day.

Could that be President Barnier?  It remains unlikely. But I no longer think that it’s impossible.

Any professional Instagrammer would shudder at the amateurish unsophistication of the video. But that is the point: Zemmour, 63, a bestselling author fired by his publishers this summer and a TV polemicist regularly sued for hate speech by advocacy groups (so far he’s won more often than he’s lost), reaches the parts of the electorate others don’t.

Although he still hasn’t formally declared his candidacy, his ramped-up media presence in recent months finally prompted polling institutes to include him in their first round voting intentions surveys. In three weeks, Zemmour jumped from 6% to 15%, ahead of Hard Left three-time candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon (9%), Green primary winner Yannick Jadot (9%) and Socialist Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo, who in the same period dropped from 7% to 5%.

But Le Z’s chief victims are all on the Right. He has all but killed off Marine Le Pen, who has dropped from 28% this summer to 17%. The two main Centre-Right candidates, Paris Region president Valérie Pécresse and Xavier Bertrand, both former Sarkozy Cabinet members, are lagging at 12% and 14% respectively, with Michel Barnier, the former Ogre of Brexit unexpectedly turned sovereignty champion, battling them for the Républicain nomination at 11%.

All are uninspiring: le Pen has been left seeming incompetent since her defeat by Macron in 2017; Pécresse and Bertrand are spouting the same things France has heard a hundred times before; and Barnier is baffling because the French, unlike the British, mostly don’t know who he is.

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Zemmour, much like other disruptive populist figures, appeals to those voters (and many no-longer voters) who had despaired of ever finding a candidate expressing their concerns. He speaks to their fears: the loss of French identity and rising insecurity caused, he believes, by unchecked immigration. His books, which have sold in the hundreds of thousands, compare a rose-tinted past Republic, where teachers were respected, fathers held solid jobs, families stayed together and classical culture wasn’t derided as pale and stale.

So far, so Trump — with a touch of Tucker Carlson. A Le Figaro journalist, Zemmour came to national pre-eminence when he was given his own daily debating show two years ago by CNEWS, a rolling news TV cable station which was re-inventing itself as the French Fox News. CNEWS’s ratings shot up, overtaking its CNN-like rival BFMTV. Le Z’s style, however, couldn’t be further from Trump’s. “Unlike my rivals, I write all my own books,” he jokes. He is highly cultured, even if one might argue that his erudition is preserved in aspic: he quotes 18^th-century philosophers and 19^th-century historians, with nary a concession to popular topics. (He does like football and the Rolling Stones.)

This fits French particularism: Les Déplorables here rarely object to cultural literacy, as long as they don’t feel it’s used to belittle them, Énarque-style. (Emmanuel Macron specialises in such putdowns.)

“Je comprends rien à ce qu’il raconte, mais il parle drôlement bien,” is a typical reaction to a Jacques Bainville- and Charles Maurras-quoting tirade by Le Z. His style and accent are demotic, his sentences are clear and his opinions trenchant. In a country where columnists, even in tabloids, prefer weighty circumlocutions to punchlines, this singles Zemmour out.

In common with Donald Trump, he relishes dropping live grenades in any debate. His first polemical essay (he’d already written a number of political biographies, including one of Jacques Chirac), published in 2006, was called Le Premier Sexe, in clear reference to Simone de Beauvoir’s 1949 The Second Sex. It bemoaned the “feminisation” of values, and whenever talking about it Zemmour never shied from adding fuel to the fire. “How did women enter the National Assembly and the Senate? Through parity laws that forced parties to select them. And I need not tell you how they were picked… They put in friends, wives, mistresses, etc.”

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He believes in the “Great Replacement” theory: he described in his Le Figaro column those areas in Paris where “one feels best, physically, the disappearance of the French population […] while, coming from the suburbs, at the end of a long journey from the depths of Africa, an Arab-Muslim people has replaced the former inhabitants.” He has continually hammered home his idea that foreign immigrants to France should give at least one “traditional” French first name to their children, drawn from the saints’ calendar, helping them to assimilate better into French society. “Your parents should have called you Corinne,” he told the television personality Hapsatou Sy, born near Paris of Senegalese parents.

In this, the Paris-born Éric Justin Léon Zemmour, son of French-Algerian Jews who had to leave Algeria in the Fifties during the independence war, harks back to the old French Républicain model of “assimilation” rather than of “integration”. “I’m a Frenchman of Berber origin,” he says. His peculiar brand of nostalgia dovetails with the long-standing history of France as a country of immigration, that, until recently, seamlessly crafted Frenchmen and women from anyone who wanted to become French.

This approach proved successful for centuries. So much so that the character who most defines, fondly, the French foibles, Astérix the Gaul, was created by the sons of immigrants: René Goscinny, a Polish-Argentinian Jew, and Albert Uderzo, an Italian builder’s son. (Another Italian builder’s son, François Cavanna, founded Charlie Hebdo.) This resonates with Zemmour’s audiences, who smart from being hectored by New York Times journalists shrieking that France is a country riven by structural racism.

Zemmour has used his personal story as a shield while positing particularly contentious theories, such as his idea that Marshall Pétain, the President of the puppet Vichy régime under German Occupation, “made a pact with the Devil, allowing the Nazis to deport foreign Jews in France in order to save French Jews”. This is a known far-Right trope in a country that carries the complicated trauma of the Collaboration.

It’s hard not to see here the influence of the old Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine’s father and founder of the National Front, now 93, whom Zemmour used to regularly visit in his Château de Montretout lair just outside Paris for long, lively discussions. Le Pen, who was fired from his own party by his daughter, himself joined the Resistance for a few weeks in 1944, aged 18. But he’s specialised in obsessive remarks about the Holocaust ever since. He is more of a provocateur than a dyed in the wool anti-Semite (which is not the case of a fringe he emboldened within his party) and probably helped cultivate Zemmour’s own taste for scandalous statements.

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Le Pen was never forgiven in France for his provocations; hence his own daughter’s symbolic parricide. But what is interesting about Zemmour is that, like Donald Trump, his mounting crowd of partisans discount his verbal excesses as just “Le Z being le Z”. In a country where, for centuries, strong opinions have had to be coated in supercilious obfuscation (there’s a reason why, for decades before the advent of the Internet, the French press was losing money), Zemmour is largely seen as an unscary shock jock, not a threatening fascist — except among the chattering classes, whom he enrages. This, of course, serves him.

What he has achieved, though, is in putting the three-I concerns of his potential voters — immigration, identity and insecurity — at the centre of the political discourse. Even a character as cautious and grey as Michel Barnier, in an effort to gain traction for the Centre-Right nomination, has now demanded a five-year moratorium on immigration to France, and attacked ECJ rulings as harmful to French sovereignty.

“The debate on immigration only exists in the [Paris] media now, no longer in public opinion,” says the shrewd social geographer Christophe Guilluy, the man who theorised “La France Périphérique”, the French version of David Goodhart’s Somewheres vs. Anywheres. This is an area where the rest of the political class, especially on the Right, usually runs scared. Their every new statement now pushes for “chosen immigration”, more means for the police, stricter criminal sentencing. Yet as former members of previous governments, however, none of the Républicain candidates seems credible on the subject.

Zemmour seems keen. He has hired a campaign team and rented a 4,000 sq ft campaign HQ less than a kilometre from the Élysée, funded by a sympathiser financier, Charles Gave. But he’s no professional politician. This an obvious asset now, that could turn into a flaw in the heat of a long campaign. If current trends hold, though, and it’s a big “if”; Zemmour might well get to the second round next year.

While all polls give a clear victory to Emmanuel Macron in the run-off today, against any candidate, the President’s reasonably high ratings of 40% last week have now slid to 34%. He is also facing a winter of discontent, with energy costs skyrocketing. His prime minister Jean Castex has just announced that the hikes would be deferred until next May, which utterly coincidentally happens to be after the April election. Added to which, 2017’s fresh young man in a hurry has now become the incumbent in a fractious country.

This is all to the disruptor’s favour. Zemmour has suddenly made France’s tired political race risky again. What if Macron didn’t even manage to clear the bar of the first round?

There is no political movement in France where the personal is more political than the former National Front. When Marine Le Pen renamed it “National Rally” in 2018, she had just achieved her (and the party’s) best performance ever — reaching the second round of the Presidential election, the year before, and scoring 34% of the vote against Emmanuel Macron. She was certain that tomorrow belonged to her. The way to success against the man who had managed to break up traditional parties Left and Right, she believed, was to offer a respectable alternative to the Macron revolution. The key to this was — symbolically — killing her transgressive father once and for all. The problem, as it always has been, is that Le Pen père, like a Breton Freddy Kruger, won’t stay dead.

The National Front had always been a family concern. Jean-Marie Le Pen’s two wives, his three daughters, most of their various husbands or boyfriends, his niece, have all held positions at one time or another in the movement. Non-Le Pen family members, however talented, can always be (and almost invariably are) expelled. Talent is actually a drawback: there’s every likelihood that if you start getting good media coverage, or try to lead an ideological faction — like, only six months ago, the Cairo-born 50-year-old ENA graduate Jean Messiha, a Copt who’s a top mandarin at the Ministère de la Défense — you will be out in the cold. Not so with family and loved ones. Marine’s mother, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s estranged first wife Pierrette, fallen on hard times after a remarkably acrimonious divorce, now lives again in a small house on her ex-husband’s estate in West Paris. Le Pen not so long ago gave a party job to a former boyfriend of Marine’s who’d at one stage run against him, and had written a vitriolic exposé on the Front.

Marine herself told me that her political consciousness was born “when I was eight, with the help of 20kgs of plastique”. In 1976, a bomb wrecked the building where the Le Pens rented two flats, one for the parents, the other above for their three girls, then 16, 12 and 8. The police never found out who’d laid it or why. What the Le Pen daughters also remember was the complete lack of support: not a single declaration from any politician condemning their attempted murder. Their clan mentality also originates with this implacable early manifestation of cancel culture.

Jean-Marie Le Pen, a former paratrooper who fought in the Indochina and Algerian wars in between-times as a Poujadiste populist MP in the National Assembly in the Fifties, never lacked enemies. At the time he famously was friends with another MP, the youngish François Mitterrand, with whom he shared a taste for good food and pretty women (as well as a similar outlook on keeping Algeria French). The advent of Charles de Gaulle in 1958 solidified the divide between Right and Left, with Le Général as incarnation of a very different Right from Le Pen’s. Le Pen founded the hard-right Front National in 1972, but its scores remained tiny until he was rescued 10 years later by none other than his old mate Mitterrand, now the Socialist president of France.

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Aware that his 1981 election had been narrow, Mitterrand decided early on that he needed to split the opposition vote. For the 1982 local elections campaign, Mitterrand ordered State-run television to stop blackballing Le Pen in political programmes, where his gift of the gab and vast historical knowledge instantly gained him followers. In 1985, aiming to minimise his projected losses to Jacques Chirac’s Gaullists the following year, Mitterrand passed a Constitutional reform to establish PR for the 1986 General election. Chirac won nonetheless, but the National Front gained big: 35 MPs in the National Assembly, a figure they’ve never reached since. PR did not last in the French system, but the Front had been transmogrified from a specialist concern into a genuine political force, and a useful foil.

Jean-Marie Le Pen enjoyed it vastly; his daughters, less. Never expecting to come to power, he became “le monstre”, the national provocateur, the man who said outrageous things where other politicians hedged: on immigration, on Europe, on “American-style capitalism” (which a whole swathe of the French Right has always loathed: long-Catholic France has a quasi-Marxist view of the evils of money and finance). When this seemed to become less edgy, he dropped anti-Semitic bombs, calling in an infamous 1987 radio interview the use of gas chambers “a mere detail” of the history of WWII, which sparked national outrage. He pointedly repeated the phrase in 1997, 2008, 2009 and finally 2015 — the moment Marine seized to oust him definitively from the party.

By that time she’d been President of the Front National for four years. Her father had pushed her 2011 candidacy, to fight off a rival bid by Bruno Gollnisch, a university professor and Euro MP, a long-time Front senior figure with an eye on the 2012 presidential candidacy. She had legitimacy — as a Front regional councillor since 1998 in France’s northern Rust Belt; as her father’s 2007 presidential bid campaign manager; and, increasingly, as the Front’s new, more acceptable face. But mostly, old Front hands tell me, “She was the Chief’s daughter. The Front is really a monarchy. It comforts the old militants. You need to be of the blood.”

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No wonder that the old patriarch feels betrayed. Marine wants to win, and believes she can. She’s looked at the rest of Europe, at Donald Trump’s rise and fall, at the divisions and lacklustre performance of the post-Sarkozy Républicains. Born in 1968, she genuinely has no interest in stirring old French ideological quarrels dating back to the Dreyfus Affair and the Occupation. She believes, especially since 2015, that mass immigration is rejected by a majority of the French — and has the polls to prove her point. She’d rather be Ivanka Kushner than The Donald. She’s not too worried about her niece Marion Maréchal, whose traditional Catholicism will gain her votes among the old style French conservative right, but not within Marine’s large Rust Belt constituencies, the northerners who 25 years ago still voted for the Communist Party.

Her real worry is Eric Zemmour, 62, a reviled but talented polemicist whose weekday evening debate, at 7:00pm, on the cable news channel CNEWS, gives him an unparalleled platform. Zemmour, who is Jewish but defends the idea that France is at heart a Catholic country, has Jean-Marie Le Pen’s debating agility (and way of stretching the occasional fact in his sweeping historical tirades) coupled with ideas matching Marion Maréchal’s. He’s come into his own by zapping woke culture and fashionable national self-abasement.

If Zemmour splits the right-wing vote, he may pave the way for the moderate Républicain Xavier Bertrand to come second in the first round of next year’s presidential election, which would probably amuse the old Jean-Marie Le Pen no end. But this is by no means certain: another scenario, comforted by early polls, shows him stealing more votes from Bertrand than Marine. His potential voters are more urban, older, better-educated: a good chunk of them want the Républicains to start running what they call “actual right-wing candidates” instead of “centrists”.

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Zemmour himself has considerably evolved in the past 10 years or so. A Le Figaro journalist since 1996, he wrote classic biographies of Edouard Balladur and Jacques Chirac that sank without trace, before specialising in sweeping essays with a provocative bent (one, called “Le Premier Sexe” as a riff off Simone de Beauvoir’s feminist classic “Le Deuxième Sexe”, bemoans the disappearance of virile man in our civilisation). His style is sort of belligerent Jordan Peterson. He believes that the French nation, inspired by the May 68 generation, is committing suicide: his 2014 book Le Suicide Français sold half a million copies.

An exciting television and radio debater, Zemmour has nonetheless been fired from a series of programmes, mostly for saying “unpalatable” things that range from the obvious (that French prisons hold mostly Muslim criminals) to the weird (a strange defence of Philippe Pétain, the Collaboration Vichy leader). It may well be that his right-wing radicalisation has been exacerbated by his opponents’ intolerance — again and again, he was kicked out from programmes where he’d multiplied audience ratings. When, two years ago, the media billionaire Vincent Bolloré decided to recreate his lagging CNEWS cable news channel into the French Fox news, Zemmour became one of the channel’s main assets.

He remains coy about his possible candidacy; but when a group linked to the National Rally Orange mayor Jacques Bompard pays for tens of thousands of “Zemmour Président” posters, it’s obvious that he has found concrete support, especially among hard-right voters who’ve lost hope in Marine Le Pen’s capacity to win. Catholic intellectuals such as Jacques de Guillebon, an adviser to Marion Maréchal, and his review L’Incorrect, are now churning out position papers for him. A group of about a thousand students and young professionals have created committees to push “Le Z”, as they call him, across France. Zemmour also works with France’s most successful hard-right mayor, the popular Robert Ménard of Béziers, a former Reporters without Borders president, and his clever MP wife Emmanuelle. An old Mariniste who has switched to this new group tells me “It’s really exciting to work with intelligent people for a change”. All of which may yet go nowhere, but underlines Marine Le Pen’s weaknesses.

“Zemmour doesn’t have the weight to carry this off”, Jean-Marie Le Pen recently answered Elisabeth Lévy, the charismatic editor of Causeur magazine, who had come to interview him in his lair on his Saint Cloud estate overlooking the city of Paris. The old patriarch could have been dismissing Zemmour in uncharacteristic defence of his own daughter. Or, equally likely, venting his sharp jealousy of a man who was closing in on what his entire clan had failed to achieve in half a century.

President Emmanuel Macron and the far-Right leader Marine Le Pen were the big losers in regional elections over the last two weekends. Cue premature political obituaries for both in parts of the British press, largely based on wishful thinking and the shallow expectation that French politics follow patterns seen elsewhere.

The truth is that Macron and Le Pen, though weakened, are still likely to be the biggest players in the presidential election next April — likely, but no longer certain. Macron’s allies took only 7% of the votes in the 12 regions of mainland France last Sunday, and only 34% of voters turned out. In other words, the Macronistes attracted 2.4% of the electorate. Disastrous.

And yet Macron remains the most popular late-term French president of the last two decades, with 50% approval in two recent surveys. In an Elabe poll taken after the weekend calamity, he topped voting intentions for next spring’s first round with 29-31% — his highest level for two years. How can that happen?

Local and national politics in France beat to different drums. Turnout was so low in the last two weekends partly because many voters have no interest in the country’s sprawling regions, created seven years ago, while Macronism — which was always a top-down movement — has failed to grow local roots. Provided there isn’t another serious Covid lockdown, Macron remains the somewhat shaky favourite to win a second term next April.

Le Pen, the smiling apostle of anger, hoped to capture at least one region for the first time this month, shattering the glass ceiling which has prevented the radical Right from running anything bigger than a medium-sized town in France for 77 years. The miserable turnout might have been expected to help her — not a bit of it. Voter turnout among her habitual supporters was even lower than the national average — only 30%. In two of her most important constituencies, the young and the white working class, it was even lower: 18% and 25%.

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Why could the people who are, according to Le Pen, angry and suffering and ready for radical change not be bothered to vote for the angry party, the Rassemblement National (ex-Front National)? Critics within her party and the wider far-Right — and there are suddenly many — have an explanation: Le Pen, they say, has become too soft.

She has cleaned up (cosmetically at least) her father’s political business in an attempt to make herself “présidentiable”. But she has succeeded only in creating another mainstream party which fails to mobilise the disaffected and the distressed.

And yet such people are unlikely to return en masse to other traditional parties next spring. They will likely turn out in much bigger numbers in the first round of the presidential election on 10 April — enough almost certainly to put Le Pen in the two-candidate run-off, but not enough to give her a realistic chance of winning the presidency in the second.

In effect, the presidential race will be decided, as it was in 2017, in the first round. Whoever reaches the second round with Le Pen wins. That could be Macron — though the regional elections did increase the chances that he will be edged out of the second round by a candidate from the old centre-right.

Indeed, the biggest single winner last Sunday was, without a doubt, Xavier Bertrand, the president of the north-eastern region, Hauts-de-France. He was easily re-elected, trouncing the far-Right and the Left-and-greens alliance.

Bertrand, 56, had already declared in March that he would run for the Elysée in April if he won in the north. An Ipsos poll at the weekend gave him 18% support in the first round of next year’s election — just behind Macron and Le Pen on 22% each.

The later Elabe poll has him only 14%. But the gap could soon close. Two incidents during the regional campaign illustrated the precarity of Macron and Le Pen’s positions. In the north-west, Macron’s home region, five ministers were sent into battle, but his party La République En Marche did not even qualify for the second round. This left Macron with an embarrassing dilemma last Sunday in Le Touquet in the Pas de Calais, where he has a holiday flat and always votes.

He could not cast a ballot for the far-Right, quite obviously, so had to choose between the Left-green alliance and Xavier Bertrand, the man who may yet be his strongest challenger next April. Macron revealed — to his credit — that he had voted for Bertrand.

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The moment that encapsulated Le Pen’s humiliation — and increased doubts about her within her own party — came when first round results were announced. At her parliamentary constituency at Hénin-Beaumont near Lille, Le Pen launched into a tirade before the televisions cameras against her own voters — or non-voters. “If you want things to change, you have to vote,” she said. “If you don’t vote, your ideas, your voices count for nothing.”

To some of her supporters, she sounded like a mainstream politician attacking the electorate for ignoring the dictates of the great and good. “I was shocked,” a senior party official told Le Figaro. “Whenever did shouting at our own people help us? She sounded just like a member of the elite saying, ‘You bunch of yokels. Wake up and vote for me.’”

Le Pen now faces a difficult party Congress next week in Perpignan. There will, I suspect, be no public splits, but instead much off-the-record moaning and a push to return to a harder line on Islamism and her abandoned pledge to leave the European Union.

In an attempt to expand her electorate into the centre-right, Le Pen ditched her support for “Frexit” in 2019 and promised, if elected, to work within the European Union and even the Euro. Meanwhile, she has made a distinction between Islam (“a great religion”) and radical Islamism — to the dismay of the many Islamophobes in her party.

Robert Ménard, the “far-Right” mayor of nearby Béziers, is a Rassemblement National fellow-traveller rather than party member, so is able to say publicly what many RN officials and supporters say privately.

“The most astonishing thing is that RN has become the object of the same public contempt as other parties, without ever having been in power,” he said recently. “People now regard the Rassemblement National as part of the political class.”

And so Le Pen faces an insoluble conundrum. Hardliners will push behind the scenes in Perpignan for a return to Euroscepticism and the barely coded racial politics of her father, Jean-Marie. Yet she knows she cannot challenge strongly in the presidential election next year if she goes down that road. This dilemma, more than any, suggests that Marine Le Pen has taken the French far-Right (in its present form) as far as she can.

She does, however, probably still have enough support among white blue-collar workers, the young and extreme nationalists to reach the two-candidate second round of the presidential elections on April 24. She is marooned in a kind of electoral twilight zone — able to assemble enough votes to reach the run-off but not enough to reach the Elysée.

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Macron faces a different dilemma. Does he ignore yesterday’s results, or try to rebuild his reputation as a grey-suited revolutionary by resurrecting a few of his proposed reforms in the autumn? Does he reshuffle his government, or does he rely on the receding pandemic and a recovering economy to see him home?

First indications are that he intends to go for broke and at least commence a couple of radical reforms — including a revival of his controversial plans to reconstruct the French pensions system (abandoned last year at the start of the Covid pandemic). If he does, it will be a sign that Macron believes that his most dangerous opponent next year will not be Marine Le Pen but the man he voted for in Le Touquet last Sunday.

It has long been probable that Macron’s greatest danger next April would come from a plausible, centre-right contender who could squeeze the President out of the top two places in the first round. Luckily for Macron there have so far been no plausible centre-right contenders; or rather, there has been a host of contenders and no accepted way to choose between them. Xavier Bertrand now threatens to be that man.

Yet Bertrand’s political offer is vague, defined as: “I am Not Macron and I am Not Le Pen”. He pledges to govern partly by referenda, borrowing one of the demands of the Gilets Jaunes movement. He says he stands for “regionalism, not Parisianism” (the Gilet Jaunes again). He emphasises that he is not an “investment banker” (Macron) nor an “heiress” (Le Pen) but a small-town insurance agent from Flavy-le-Martel in Picardy who “comes from the people” and found himself swept into politics.

This positioning or pretence — “Monsieur Bertrand goes to Paris” — disguises the fact that he held ministerial positions for nine years under both Chirac and Sarkozy; that he was a member of parliament for 12 years and secretary general of the main centre-right party for two years (divorcing two wives along the way).

Bertrand, to put it simply, does not offer a new beginning. He offers a return to the something-for-everyone, do-very-little politics which allowed France to drift aimlessly through much of the 1990s and early 2000s (and again under François Hollande).

Macron, by reviving his shelved reform agenda, doubtless hopes to expose the vacuity of Xavier Bertrand. In the meantime, however, Bertrand’s immediate enemies are neither Macron nor Le Pen, but other centre-right barons, and one baronness, Valérie Pécresse, president of the greater Paris region, Île-de-France. At least four of them — including the former EU Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier — have ambitions to be the single centre-right candidate next April.

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Which of them will triumph? The main centre-right party Les Républicains is thinking of organising some kind of beauty contest, but is not sure how or what or when, with a decision due in September. In any case, Bertrand, who resigned from Les Républicians in 2017, says he will ignore any decision by the party to impose a single “traditional Right” contender — unless presumably it is himself.

In other words, there is a strong possibility that there will be two centre-right candidates (at least) in the field of a dozen or more runners in the first round of the presidential elections, That would almost guarantee that Macron and Le Pen top the poll and qualify for the second round — likely guaranteeing Macron a second term.

There are, however, several other “known unknowns”, as well as maybe some “unknown unknowns”. The pandemic has more or less evaporated in France, and the economy is recovering strongly — with 5.7% growth predicted this year. Unless those things change, Macron’s high approval ratings will persist. But they may change, with the Delta variant spreading fast, and doubling in the last week.

The French vaccination programme recovered from a slow start and now covers (with one jab at least) two-thirds of the adult population and four-fifths over 65s. All the same, a fourth wave of Covid — bringing renewed lockdowns and another shock to the economy – could ruin Macron’s chances next year — without re-floating those of Le Pen.

French politics is wonderfully complex, but complexity sometimes has dull consequences. And a President Xavier Bertrand would be a fittingly dull prospect.

There have been many rounds of “father vs daughter” battles — culminating in Jean-Marie’s expulsion from his far-right political party, and family business, five years ago.

There is a personal and political rivalry, still unresolved, between Marine Le Pen and her niece Marion.

Now the clan that has dominated the far-right of French politics for the past half-century has developed a potential, new split — between Marine, the party president, and her vice-president and former romantic partner, Louis Aliot.

Aliot, 50, was the twice-divorced Marine’s lover for a decade until they separated last year. Last month, he scored an impressive victory in the French local elections.

Already a member of parliament for the Rassemblement National (né Front National), he became mayor of Perpignan in the southwest, the biggest French town to fall to the far right in 25 years.

“This was a great victory, a game changer,” Marine, the RN president, said. Her party had defeated, she pointed out, a second-round “Republican alliance” of all the local parties, both left and right.

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Well, not quite.

Aliot, the party’s number two, did not run as a Rassemblement National candidate. He ran as the leader of a hard-right alliance, including the RN.

Although he remains officially a fervent “Mariniste” he refused to invite her to a single campaign meeting. He ran on a different message — avowedly right-wing, rather than the RN’s official mantra of  “neither left nor right”.

His campaign was heavily influenced by Robert Menard, the hard-right but not RN, mayor of a nearby town, Béziers, who has split publicly with Marine Le Pen in the past three years. Menard joined Aliot at campaign meetings. Marine was kept away.

Some party insiders insist that Aliot is politically loyal, and suggest that he lacks the energy, skills or inclination to become a political rival. “He is not a very active man. As vice president of the party, he has been almost invisible. Being mayor of Perpignan will be more than enough to keep him busy,” one senior party member said.

Other RN insiders worry all the same about the informal alliance between Aliot and Menard, which threatens to widen an ideological split in the Rassemblement National between its southern and northern tribes.

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Menard is a left-wing journalist turned far-right politician who has built a power base in Béziers in the past six years. Since 2017, he has been campaigning openly for a new post-Le Pen leadership of the French nationalist-populist, anti-muslim, anti-European right.

He told French TV viewers recently that there was no prospect of Marine Le Pen winning the 2022 presidential election — despite the unpopularity of President Emmanuel Macron; despite the deep post-Covid economic recession which threatens France this year and next.

Menard, re-elected easily in the first round of this year’s local elections, said that a repeat Macron vs Le Pen second round in May 2022 was “Macron’s insurance policy that he will win a second term”.

“That statement confronts the Rassemblement National with two problems”, says a senior party official. “First, Menard has been campaigning with Louis Aliot in Perpignan. Secondly, Menard is saying publicly what many people inside the party think privately. Marine can’t win in 2022.”

Outside France, commentators often assume — with fear or with fond hope — that Macron’s troubles may bring the far right to power in France in two years’ time. The opinion polls — though long-range and unreliable — suggest that Menard is right. Marine Le Pen has made up some ground since 2017 but is still a long way off.

She lost in the second round three years ago by 66% to 34%. A recent IFOP poll suggested that Macron and Le Pen would once again reach the two candidate run-off in 2022 and that the President would be re-elected comfortably but less crushingly than last time – by 55% to 45%. Another put the gap even wider, at 61-39.

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The results of last month’s local elections — three town halls won, two lost — were also disappointing for the RN. They had originally targeted 50 towns.

Why, Marine’s critics inside the party ask, has she failed to draw significant dividends from the gilets jaunes rural and outer suburban rebellion in 2018-9? Why has she failed to gain political advantage from the Covid-19 crisis (when she made a series of strident, self-contradictory statements)?

The party’s chaotic finances — undermined by two prosecutions for alleged fraud, a failure to repay a Russian loan and the dethroned patriarch Jean-Marie’s demand for repayment of several million euros — are a partial explanation. So is the increasing divide between the RN tribes of North (blue collar, ex-left-voting, anti-immigrant, pro-big state) and South (ex-centre-right, anti-state and anti-muslim).

There is a section of the RN membership — and a large part of the wider French hard right and ultra-right — that would like to see the back of the Le Pens. The family name and family control of the party is, they believe, a barrier to the kind of success that the nationalist-populist anti-European right has enjoyed in Italy or Austria.

There is no prospect of such a change before the next presidential election. The family’s financial and emotional stranglehold on the RN is too great. If Marine fails for a third time, that will change but no obvious successor is yet apparent.

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Marine’s niece Marion Maréchal was once spoken of as a possible future leader but she has now left the party and dropped the “Le Pen” from her name.

Are there any real ideological differences between father, daughter and niece? Yes, but there are also differences of ambition and political strategy.

Jean-Marie Le Pen, 92, is a sincere anti-semite and racist, descended from an extreme nationalist tradition in France which goes back well before fascism. Arguably, he never had an interest in power or government only in the “purity” of his ideas and the force of his own personality and rhetoric.

Marine, 51, is a second generation manager of a family enterprise. It’s not clear that she believes in anything very much. She is convinced that “Le Pen PLC” can only be truly successful if re-branded as patriotic, not racist (while constantly exploiting fears of an alleged Islamisation of France).

She is likeable but limited, especially in her grasp of economics. She does not want to ally with the centre-right but to replace its shaky hold on the conservative middle class — just as the RN has already become the most popular single party with the white, working class. Hence, her slogan “neither left nor right”.

Influenced by her own constituency in the ex-mining and industrial north of France, she has moved the party away from its Poujadiste, anti-state, anti-Communist, racist origins to something much more statist and interventionist — in other words both nationalist and socialist.  She has stamped out all overt signs of anti-semitism or racism (but not hostility to Islam).

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Marion, 30, is an old fashioned Catholic conservative (despite her own divorce). She is fiercely intelligent but lacks her grandfather and her aunt’s charisma. She has taken a break from active politics to found a nationalist-Catholic political science university in Lyon.

She believes that the French Right — both far right and centre-right — should be merged and refounded as a nationalist movement based on traditional Catholic and free market values.

These tensions within the party — and the family — were laid bare last month by the 80^th anniversary of Charles de Gaulle’s BBC radio appeal from London for French resistance against the Nazis.

Marine Le Pen likes to use De Gaulle as a symbol of her efforts — partially successful — to detoxify the Le Pen brand since she became party president in 2011. When I interviewed her the previous year, she told me that she would have been pro-De Gaulle in 1940, not pro-Vichy (the |Nazi-sympathising regime which ran part of France for four years until 1944).

For the 80^th anniversary of De Gaulle’s London appeal on 18 June she went much further. She wrote an article lionising De Gaulle as a “great man”. She said that le général foreshadowed the same nationalist, “neither left nor right values” that she did.

She attempted to gate-crash celebrations on the Ile de Sein off Brittany — a Gaullist shrine because all of its men sailed away to join the general in London in 1940. She was booed and jeered by the islanders.

Marine’s failed takeover bid for Gaullism was widely mocked in the French media. It also did her enormous harm within a traditionalist section of the party — especially in the South.

Her father, Jean-Marie, detests De Gaulle and Gaullism. In the first volume of his memoirs published two years ago, he wrote that De Gaulle “will always for me be a horrible source of suffering for France”.

Few RN members would now claim to be the spiritual descendants of Vichy. Many still support or remember nostalgically the cause of French Algeria, betrayed, they believe, by De Gaulle in 1962.

Almost all of them — “pieds noirs”, French north African colonists or their descendant or sympathisers — live in one of the RN heartlands in the lower Rhone valley and the coastal plain of the Mediterranean from Toulon to the Spanish border.

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“The whole De Gaulle anniversary episode was ill-conceived. It illustrates the poor quality of the young and ignorant people who now surround her,” a senior party insider said.

To Marine, being a latter-day Gaullist is just clever politics — a way of breaking down the walls which still divide the right and far right in France. It is a way of identifying herself and her rebranded party with official French identity and history (however simplified).

To others in the party — and the harder and further right outside the party — it confirms their view that Marine is lightweight and not a sincere nationalist. She misunderstands, and even disapproves of, the core identity of a movement which is all about identity.

Marine is already disliked by the ultra-Catholic tribe within the RN for being twice divorced, for being a female politician, for being pro-abortion and for having gay men in her entourage. She has now angered another, mostly southern, anti-Gaullist tribe by insulting their alternative view of French history.

A former senior party official said: “The De Gaulle escapade may have helped her with some new RN voters or members who don’t know about, or prefer not to known about, the party’s origins. It was very damaging to her in the south.”

*

The campaign that Louis Aliot ran this year in the struggling French-Catalan city of Perpignan (over 20% unemployment) ignored some of Marine’s favourite themes and arguments. It was based on the strategy of Robert Menard (who is himself a pied noir) in Béziers, 50 miles to the north.

Aliot attacked the clientelism and corruption of mainstream parties. He promised to be tough on crime. So far so normal for the RN.

But he also stressed “southern” and local identity and values. He promised to bring religious and ethnic communities together. He avoided most — not all — of the normal RN Muslim-baiting themes.

Above all, he kept Marine away and kept the RN name and logo off his campaign posters and literature.

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Parts of the far-right electorate in the French south have long ago split from Lepennism and thrown in their lot with the alternative, regional movement, the Ligue du Sud, started by the ex-Lepennist mayor of Orange, Jacques Bompard, 10 years ago. Bompard also stresses the “authenticity” of “warm” southern French values compared to the alleged arrogance and elitism of Paris and the north.

Marion Maréchal (then Maréchal-Le Pen) was seen as a possible future southern queen for the RN (then FN) when she was elected member of parliament for Carpentras in the Rhône valley, aged  22, in 2012. Her political ambitions now seem to be outside her grandfather and her aunt’s movement.

Menard — never a Lepennist but once part of the wider “Bleu Marine” coalition — has hinted in a TV interview in recent weeks that he will consider running for president himself in 2022. He will then be 69; he is a successful mayor but poor orator and uncharismatic TV performer.

Some within the RN fear — others maybe hope — that his alliance with Aliot in Perpignan is not just temporary or local. They think that he wants to groom Marine’s former boyfriend as her successor — not for 2022 but for 2027.

The soap opera continues…

Or not, as it turned out.

Four years after the win, in 2002, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s appeals to the racial fears of white voters carried him into the second round of the French presidential election. In October 2005, the country was convulsed by three weeks of anti-police riots in the multi-racial ‘banlieues’ – suburbs – of every city and large town in the country.

These ‘banlieues’, long a source of cosmic dread to white France, have since become associated with Charlie Hebdo, the Bataclan, Nice and the 1,000 or more young French people who volunteered to serve Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.

The pattern of the last two decades – hopes of racial harmony raised by sport and contradicted by stubborn reality – threatens to repeat itself this summer as another wonderful, brown, white and black French football team graces the World Cup in Russia. Eight members of this French squad, which has briefly united a racially and socially divided nation were brought up in the Paris suburbs where the 2005 riots began.

On Friday, just like in 1998, multi-racial crowds from those suburbs invaded the boulevards and avenues of Paris to celebrate the team’s progress to the semi-finals. And yet last week there were also four nights of anti-police riots in the multi-racial suburbs of Nantes, birthplace of Jules Verne and one of the most quietly attractive of French cities.

These explosions of car-burning and attacks on public buildings in retaliation for alleged police brutality remain commonplace. The Islamist threat also persists. French security services revealed last month that they had thwarted half a dozen plans by Isis old boys or their sympathisers to commit fresh atrocities on French soil.

The ‘banlieue problem’, a synonym for France’s race problem, has been one that all French presidents since 2005 have promised to solve. Jacques Chirac and François  Hollande tried to do it with modest amounts of money, Nicolas Sarkozy with a “Karcher” or high-powered hose. None succeeded.

Further reading

Flyover France – the forgotten frontier

By Peter Franklin

The crime and drug problems are getting worse; unemployment, over 20 per cent among the young in the Paris banlieues, has hardly moved; the spread of militant Islamic teaching, not yet a serious issue in 2005, has undermined parents and community leaders and eroded the always limited sympathy of urban and posh-suburban France for the scary world beyond the “Boulevard Périphérique”.

The banlieues are an archipelago of mostly high-rise housing estates thrown up around all French cities in the 1960s and 1970s to provide homes for migrants from North Africa, from the French overseas departments, from former French colonies in sub-Saharan Africa but also from southern and eastern Europe and from rural France. They are almost always outside the city boundaries, with Marseille a notable exception.  The ‘inner city’ problems of other countries are ‘suburban problems’ in France and were, for many years, all the more easily ignored.

They were not, however, mono-racial ghettoes in the US or even the British sense. I met gangs of youths in the 1990s and 2000’s whose parents or grandparents were Algerians, Yugoslavs, Portuguese, Ivoirians and working class white French. This was, essentially, the racial profile of the mobs which burned cars and schools in the autumn of 2005.

This was also the racial profile of the France team that won the 1998 World Cup. The brightest star of this year’s team, Kylian Mbappé, from Bondy just north of the Paris city boundary, is also a product of this once racially integrated character of the “banlieues”. He was born, in December 1998, to an Algerian mother and a Cameroonian father.

But much has changed in the banlieues since the 2005 riots – arguably for the worse.

Over the past decade, radical Islam has been offering an alternative ‘identity’ to disenchanted youths with muslim backgrounds. This has created new barriers and animosities between races and religions in the banlieues. Life for women has become more oppressive. Many cités (tower-block estates) have become mono-ethnic. White French or eastern or southern Europeans have become segregated from people of north African and African origin.

France would officially deny the existence of racial or religious ‘communities’ or even different races. For years French politicians dismissed Britain’s more relaxed, ‘multi-cultural’ policy as dangerous. In truth, neither approach has prevented the spread of extremist Islam.  Nor has it been much help to those trying to escape the suburbs.

The indivisible, we-are-all-French approach, conceals tenacious prejudices and barriers. In France, a recent study found, a young person with an Arab or African name is four times less likely to be interviewed for a job. Brown or black faces are finally beginning to be seen in presenting roles on French TV but much less so than in Britain. There have been several leading ministers in recent years from Arab or French west Indian backgrounds but there are none in senior positions under Macron.

This is not just to France’s discredit but also to its loss. The banlieues, in my experience, can be terrible, violent, destructive places. But they are also an immense reservoir of creativity, talent, energy, hard-work and tenacity – and not just in the visible fields of football and French rap music.

Further reading

Is there still room for the Republicans in France?

By Marie Le Conte

Might the new President make a difference? During and after his successful election campaign last year, Emmanuel Macron promised a “new approach”. He said that the solution to the banlieue problem is indistinguishable from his solution to the wider “French problem”: the breaking down of the corporatist barriers which make France a comfortable country for “insiders” but a miserable place for “outsiders” and especially racial minorities and the young. He may be right about that.

In May, the former centre-right economics minister, Jean-Louis Borloo presented a much-delayed plan for a 50bn euro project to rescue the banlieues. He made 19 proposals, including short-circuiting bureaucratic delays to speed new transport projects and to replace the worst of the old schools and tower blocks.

He suggested the creation of a new “corps” of French senior civil servants to supervise the resurgence of the suburbs, recruited from the cleverest kids in the banlieues themselves. He proposed the creation of tens of thousands of new jobs, ranging from sports coaches to care workers.

Macron cherry-picked a few of the ideas but dismissed the approach as “old thinking”. The plan, he said, was just another top-down, bureaucratic exercise in which well-meaning “white males” imposed solutions on a disenchanted, young and racially heterogeneous population. He may have had a point.

His critics say that he did not want to spend the money or annoy the right-wing section of his electoral coalition or anger rural France, which would rather like a 50bn euro Marshall Plan of its own. They probably also had a point.

The President’s decision was, though, heavily influenced by his controversial special adviser on racial and banlieues issues, a comedian turned political polemicist called Yassine Belattar.

Mr Belattar has been attacked in the French press for suggesting that there is no real problem with radical Islam in France. His argument is in fact more subtle. He says that militant islam exploits a vacuum of identity and purpose among the poor-suburban second and third generation migrants. Such kids are, he says, more French than they realise and more French than urban and rural France is willing to acknowledge. Enforcing a narrow, traditional sense of French identity pushes them towards the extremists and criminal gangs. Instead, Mr Belattar says, the banlieue kids should be encouraged to channel their energies into creativity and entrepreneurship.

This may sound hopelessly vague and optimistic when one considers how much a 17-year-old youth can make from selling cocaine. However, Macron’s drive to make it easier to hire and fire in France – against the will of some of the big trades union federations – is already spawning new opportunities for young people in the banlieues. (Sunday opening of shops; new inter-city bus-routes; more taxi drivers and chauffeurs.)

But there can be no quick fix for a problem which has been 60 years in the making. Some of Mr Borloo’s 50 billion euros would doubtless be handy. But Mr Belattar is right. The solution, if any, is spiritual and psychological as much as political or economic.

The dreaded banlieues have much to offer France so long as they can be persuaded – along with the rest of the country – that they are part of France. There is no reason that they should be solely a breeding ground for footballing talent, terrorists and drugs-traffickers.

The fact that banlieue youths identify with a France football team and wave the tricolour on the Grands Boulevard or the Champs Elysées is significant. It remains to be seen whether the Mbappé generation will be more successful than the Zidane generation in finally bridging the moat of suspicion and ignorance which separates France’s lovely old cities from their ugly, violent, dynamic inner suburbs.

Further reading

Why citizens of nowhere will never get the World Cup

By Giles Fraser