I happened to be standing beside a young man distributing leaflets when Elisabeth Borne, France’s new Prime Minister, and several TV crews approached. You don’t see many TV cameras in Thury Harcourt, in the hills 30 kilometres south of Caen. You don’t see many prime ministers either.

The young man began to berate the PM. Why was she scared to debate with him in public, he asked? Madame Borne put him down politely. “I am very pleased to meet you and I hope that we’re all going to campaign nicely,” she said.

It was only then that I realised that the young man was Noé Gauchard, the local candidate for the Left-Green alliance Nouvelle Union Populaire Ecologique et Sociale (or Nupes for short).

Madame Borne became France’s second female prime minister last week. She is running for election — for the first time in her long career as a public servant — in my home constituency, the sixth circonscription of Calvados. After becoming boss of the Paris Metro, after becoming a regional Prefect in uniform and white gloves, after becoming three kinds of minister during President Emmanuel Macron’s first term, Elisabeth Borne has decided that it is time to get herself elected.

You have to give her credit for that. She doesn’t have to be a member of parliament to be the PM in France. If she wins, she will have to resign the seat and allow her running mate to become the local MP. If she loses, she will have to step down as Prime Minister — not for any legal reason but because Macron has made that the rule for all members of his government who are running in the parliamentary elections on 12 and 19 June. So here, down my way, came an event which could only happen in France: a Prime Minister campaigning for votes for the first time in her life.

How would Elisabeth Borne, a classic product of the French technocracy, take to being a stump politician? She is a fiercely competent and hard-working woman, but is reputed to have little charisma. Her nickname when head of the Paris Metro was “Borne-Out (because she burned out her staff). “She is not a barrel of laughs,” one Macron ally says. “But, then again, government is not the Club Med.”

The Prime Minister spent 45 minutes at the Thury Harcourt Vide-Grenier (attic-clearance sale), which is an occasional opportunity for local people to exchange their unwanted rubbish for other people’s unwanted rubbish. You could buy Johnny Hallyday’s Greatest Hits, Volume 12. Or a casserole with no lid.

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I thought that, for a first-timer, she did pretty well. She came over like a hospital matron of the old school doing the rounds of the wards. She has a lovely smile, which is rarely seen on television. She listened for longer than was strictly necessary to complaints about high pump prices or Emmanuel Macron. She was able to connect with people — especially, it seemed, the women. She allowed selfies to be taken with children.

Borne made one beginner’s mistake, however. She didn’t buy anything. A practiced French stump politician visiting a market would always buy something. It doesn’t have to be Johnny Hallyday’s Greatest Hits Volume 12.

***

Borne’s mother was a pharmacist who came from Livarot, a little further east in Calvados. Her father was a Holocaust survivor and resistance hero who never recovered from his wartime trauma and committed suicide when Elisabeth was 11-years-old.

She was brought up in Paris and rose through the ranks of the French meritocracy. She trained as an engineer at France’s premier engineering school, Ecole Polytechnique, whose students — still almost all men to this day — have uniforms and ceremonial swords. She then worked, in increasingly senior roles, in the private offices of a series of Socialist politicians: the culture minister Jack Lang, the Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin, President François Hollande, the mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoe. She regarded herself as “of the Left” but never joined the Socialist Party.

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She was one of the first women to become a Prefect of a French region, in Poitou-Charentes. During the first Macron presidency, Borne was successively transport, environment and employment minister. She is credited by some (and blamed by the unions and part of the Left) for pushing through two of the most important reforms of the Macron era: the opening of the state French railways to competition and making the terms for unemployment pay tougher (but still more generous than most other EU countries).

Fast forward to Macron’s re-election on 24 April, and she is reported to have been his first choice as Prime Minister. He then spent three weeks looking at other options, all of whom were women. He had decided that, 30 years after the brief and disastrous term of Edith Cresson in 1991-2, it was time for France to have a second female PM.

Macron was torn between choosing a woman with proven experience in national government and one with deep roots in local or regional politics. He is reported by the French media to have almost made another choice, Catherine Vautrin, the centre-right president of the Greater Rheims area in eastern France. But several of his closest aides pointed out that Vautrin had once been a vocal opponent of the legalisation of gay marriage in France. Macron backed away rather than offend his supporters on the centre or the centre-left.

After three weeks, the President returned to his original choice: Elisabeth Borne. This stuttering process — the longest delay before the appointment of a new PM since the present doubled-headed French government system began in 1965 — reveals two things: one about Macron, the other about the changing status of French Prime Ministers.

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The first is that Macron, who appears confident, even arrogant, can be indecisive, especially when it comes to choosing people. He is often torn between doing what he thinks will be the right thing and what will be the clever thing.

The second is more profound. It used to be that the Prime Minister was a disposable front-bumper or a fuse to protect the President from being damaged by random events — especially during domestic crises. All the same, the PM used to have a certain amount of autonomy. They were often senior politicians from the President’s own ideological family. They ran the country while the President presided.

But since the seven-year presidential term was reduced to align with the five-year parliamentary term from 2007, the role of the French Prime Minister has become uncertain, even problematic. The semi-detached status of French Presidents is no longer tenable in the age of Twitter and 24-hour TV news. If the President leaves too much to the PM, he is accused of being aloof; if he takes all the decisions, he is accused of being overbearing.

Macron is frequently accused of both. He resented the popularity of his independent-minded, first Prime Minister, Edouard Philippe. He had a much better working relationship with his successor, the hard-working, unassuming but effective Jean Castex. Any French Prime Minister now risks being Prime Minister only in name. He or she no longer leads the majority party in parliament because French parties have all but vanished and have been replaced with permanent or shifting alliances.

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In theory, Borne — with zero experience as an electoral strategist — will spearhead Macron’s forces in the parliamentary campaign next month: the half-dozen parties and factions which make up his centrist alliance, Ensemble. The campaign will actually be led by a committee of  more experienced stump politicians with Macron (officially banned from campaigning as head of state) directing operations in the background.

All of which means that the French Prime Minister, whatever the constitution may say, has become a kind of Super-Chief-of- Staff or a Grand Vizir. Castex was well-suited to that role. Elisabeth Borne — demanding, tough, intellectually impressive — should also be in her element.

But like her more successful predecessors, she has to find a way of connecting with the French without making Macron jealous. And she has to win her first election in the sixth circonsciption of Calvados. If my own little patch of France rejects her on 19 June, she will be the shortest-serving prime minister of the Fifth Republic. I suspect, however, that it won’t reject her. Macron came first in this area in both the first and second round of the Presidential elections in April. In any case, the words “Prime Minister” may be devalued in Paris but they still mean something in rural France.

In the Thury Harcourt market, I spoke to Patrick, 58, a local beef farmer and village councillor just after he had chatted to Madame Borne. “I was surprised,” he said. “She was easy to talk to and seemed genuinely interested in farming. But even if she is as dull and cold as people say she is, she would win. How often do you see prime ministers in Thury Harcourt? Never. It will be a great and wonderful thing for this area to elect a Prime Minister.”

Nationally, the polls suggest that this strange, long-frozen election will be a close-run thing — much closer than seemed possible two or three weeks ago. New survey data even suggests Le Pen could sneak victory, though Macron probably still has the edge.

My village Culey-le-Patry has no crime, no obvious suffering and no immigrants apart from myself and a couple of other Britons. Nonetheless, Marine Le Pen — far-Right, anti-migrant, anti-EU, enthusiastically pro-Putin until February — will sweep to local victory here in both rounds of the election. The same thing will happen in thousands of villages across France.

Village by village, that vote is tiny. Culey only has 280 electors, and a population of 355. There are, however, 30,000 angry villages in France: angry at petrol prices; angry at poor services; angry without really being able to explain why they are angry.

Yet this anger is nothing new — nor is it entirely Macron’s fault. In the second round in 2017, Le Pen got 34% of the vote across France; in my village, she got 44.7%. In the first round, Macron led the poll nationally; in Culey-le-Patry, he came fourth, while Le Pen came first with 29% of the votes. She may get over 50% this year.

Historically, Normandy is not fertile territory for the far-Right — unlike, say, the struggling parts of the industrial North or the Paris-hating South-East. And yet rural Normandy has been swinging gradually towards the Le Pens, father and daughter, for two decades. The smaller the village and the greater the distance from a large town, the bigger the Le Pen vote.

Little by little — it started long before Macron and the Gilets Jaunes — villages like Culey-le-Patry have changed political sides. They used to be the bedrock of the centre-right, Gaullist and soft-Left status quo in France. They have become, almost without realising it, a breeding ground for a tear-it-down populism which seeks to destroy France’s outward-looking, pro-European post-war consensus.

And yet few people in Culey or similar villages care about politics or follow political events from day to day. Several people I spoke to were unaware that the opinion polls had shifted dramatically in recent days. They assumed Macron would win but intended to vote for Le Pen. I did not find a single person who said they would vote, or had ever intended to vote, for her far-right rival Eric Zemmour. His rise (and fall) was largely a metropolitan/suburban phenomenon.

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Zemmour’s decline was partly fuelled by his long history of enthusiasm for Vladimir Putin. This is something shared by Le Pen, but she has soared in the last three weeks, mostly at Zemmour’s expense, by focusing on high prices and low wages. The overall far-Right share of the vote (32-34%) has scarcely changed.

In my conversations, not one person brought up the war. They spoke of the high petrol and diesel prices caused partly by Putin’s invasion without mentioning it directly. An exception was our mayor, Marie-Christine Danlos. “I think people here do care about Ukraine,” she said. “Certainly they do. We are surrounded by the memories and scars of war from the summer of 1944. I certainly hear no pro-Russian feeling. None at all.”

“But in the end most people here are tightly wrapped in their own lives. They live for today and tomorrow. They feel sympathy for Ukraine but they are very, very angry about petrol and diesel prices. They are angry and worried about rising food prices. Who do they hear on TV talking most persuasively about the cost of living and purchasing power? Marine Le Pen.”

Mme Danlos, 70, is a retired social worker. She has always voted for the Left. This year she will vote for the hard-Left candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, not because she likes his extreme positions against the EU and Nato, but because he is the only Left-wing candidate with a slim chance of reaching the second round.

“I’m afraid of Le Pen,” Mme Danlos said. “And do you know why? Because I find myself nodding in agreement with her when I see her on TV. She speaks good sense about prices and low incomes. She comes over these days like a traditional candidate of the Right, not the far-Right.

“I fear that it hides a great deal. None of it will be good for this country or the people of Culey-le Patry. And yet she will get a lot of votes here and in the surrounding villages. A lot.”

***

Culey-le-Patry is in the valley of the river Orne, about 40 kilometres south of Caen. The commune, including a main village Le Bourg and ten hamlets, stretches five kilometres from the western bank of the river to the ridge of the highest hills in Calvados. The whole area was mistitled La Suisse Normande — Norman Switzerland — by a British journalist a century ago. It is more like Shropshire or Herefordshire than Switzerland.

When I first came to live here, 24 years ago, there were still 20 or so farms, large and small, including two tiny, scarcely-mechanised dairy ones in my own hamlet (population: 8). There are now just five, highly-mechanised farms in the eight square kilometres of the commune — and none in the hamlet.

Year by year, I have watched as the Caen suburbs march southwards along the main roads and climb up the hillsides. Our main village has its own small estate of a dozen bungalows, inhabited by people who drive every day to work in Caen. There is no tension with the long-time locals; there is no contact with them at all.

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One by one, many of the wonderful local characters that I got to know 20 years ago have died or moved away. There was Jean-Michel, the hippy-farmer who drove his tractor backwards because all the other gears no longer worked. He moved south and last I heard he was an agricultural inspector.

There was Bernard, a successful farmer who was delivered by an SS doctor during the height of the Battle of Normandy, in July 1944. He flew his own bright-yellow light aircraft off one of his fields until one day, after morning-milking, he failed to come home.

He is buried in the Culey cemetery, next to Sergeant Maurice “Mike” Wilson of the Royal Australian Air Force, whose Spitfire crashed in the commune in June 1944, just before the SS doctor delivered Bernard. The doctor (a resolute Nazi until the end) used to visit Bernard — calling him “my French son” — each summer from the mid-Seventies until he died in the late Nineties.

The commune used to be divided socially between farmers and non-farmers (whom the former tended to despise). It was also divided between “the people of the church” who voted centre-right and “the non-church people” who voted to the Left.

Along with the school, Culey church closed, except for funerals, in the Eighties. The bar-restaurant shut ten years ago. Of the remaining population, perhaps only 150 are Culey born-and-bred (although that includes three of the eight people in my hamlet, who have lived there for 80 years or more).

In the 20 years that I have known it, Culey-le-Patry has become younger and more prosperous but its sense of community has diminished. That may change. We have 50 local children (the highest figure for a long time). They know each other much better than their parents do. They all travel to school together on the bus.

I see no evidence of great poverty or suffering but people keep their secrets to themselves. Mme Danlos, the mayor, says several local families rely quietly on the “Restos de Coeur” and Catholic food charities.

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There are seven doctors within ten kilometres; a health centre; a council gym; loads of shops in the valley; a cheap bus service into Caen. A fast broad-band cable system, installed by hardy teams of contract workers of Polish and North African origin, will be switched on for every house in our obscure commune this month.

Neglected, rural France? Not really. Not all of it.

What is lacking is a local source of prosperity and pride — the small dairy farms on the hills and the factories and iron-ore mines which once provided jobs down in the valley. We are now a community with no clear raison d’être and no longer any real sense of community.

Other places in France may have more specific reasons for their anger with the establishment and the elites — crime, unemployment, immigration. In Culey, there is anger at high fuel and food prices. But that is a temporary phenomenon. There is also an  ill-defined feeling of marginalisation and loss: of not belonging to the successful, outward-looking France of Paris, Toulouse and Bordeaux, but no longer having any clear local identity either.

Denis, 78, a retired farmer told me: “Farming, living from the land, not just in the countryside, used to be what brought us together here. Now we farmers and ex-farmers are a small minority. People — and not just these new hoursins (incomers) from Caen — are furious if they have to wait for a tractor blocking the road.”

Denis has always voted centre-right — for De Gaulle in 1965, for Chirac in 1995 and 2002, for Sarkozy in 2007 and 2012. In 2017, he spoiled his ballot rather than vote for Macron or Le Pen in the second round. This year, he will vote for the centre-right in Round One and Le Pen rather than Macron in Round Two. “I don’t like her but she is not going to win anyway and I can’t stand Macron,” he said. “Even after five years I just don’t know who he is.”

Jean-Philippe, 28, is a plumber who drives 40 kilometres to work in Caen each day. He was very active in the Gilets Jaunes movement of 2018-9, which began partly in protest against pump prices when diesel was €1.50 a litre.

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Last month, after the Ukraine war began, diesel rocketed to €2.20 a litre but has now subsided to €1.80, partly thanks to an €0.18 a litre government rebate. Jean-Philippe said: “The price of diesel and petrol is still much too high. Sometimes I wonder if I can afford to go to work. I would be better off claiming unemployment pay. It’s fine the government blaming Russia and the war. But why don’t they cut the 20% VAT on fuel to 5.5% like Marine Le Pen says she will? The politicians would rather give the money to  migrants, or to themselves, than help rural people like us.”

Who will Jean-Phillippe vote for? Le Pen in both rounds.

One of my most eloquent guides to Culey politics had always been my next-door neighbour’s cousin, Catherine, aged 58. “It’s complicated,” she says.  “It’s very complicated. Don’t say it’s all about xenophobia and immigration because that would not be correct. If an Arab family moved to Culey, they would be treated like everyone else. No one would scrawl graffiti on their house.”

“And yet the vote for the far-Right goes up at every election. Why? There is no crime, no sense of being insecure. Most people, like me, if they go out for a few minutes will leave their door unlocked.”

“There is a kind of submerged racism here. People see brown and black faces on the TV news or in the French football team. It’s not the France they know. They feel threatened, even though there is no direct threat to them. They vote Le Pen as a kind of protest or gesture…”

As Catherine says: “It’s complicated.”

***

Macron’s rural failure is not so much to have failed to invest in La France Profonde. Whatever the Gilets Jaunes may say, successive French governments have hugely subsidised rural France from urban and suburban taxes. Rather, Macron’s rural failure is part of his wider inability to persuade the whole of France that it can share in the outward-looking confidence and prosperity of its thriving cities.

When she slipped from view during Zemmour’s rise last year, Le Pen embarked on a village Tour de France. She gained lots of positive publicity in local papers, unnoticed at the time by the Paris and foreign media, including me. Her message was always the same: “Village France is the real France. The rebuilding of the real France starts with you.”

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It was a flattering message but a deeply misleading one. There can be no future for village France if France as a whole is not prosperous. Le Pen’s policies — disconnection from Europe, discrimination against immigrants — would turn the whole of France into a village, isolated from Europe and the world.

From the ridge above Culey, you can see the flatlands of western France which stretch all the way to the Pyrenean foothills. We are just one pebble in thousands of similar pebbles on that beach, all no doubt with a similar ill-defined feeling of lost local pride and prosperity. The suffering of such places is finally more existential than economic. This is not a question of Somewhere and Anywhere. It is a sense of Somewhere-Lost.

Neither Marine Le Pen nor her 5% VAT on fuel will bring a sense of identity and pride to the many Culeys out there. They will, all the same, vote massively for her tomorrow.

*Some have names have been changed.

Madame Bovary was set in the place he hated most: his home. He was born 200 years ago, in Normandy, to the distinguished and fabulously named doctor Achille-Cléophas Flaubert, and his saturnine wife Caroline. The region is famous for the Franco-Viking rovers who conquered England and Sicily; exquisite Gothic architecture; and the city where Joan of Arc was put to death. But it’s also a maritime region connected to the English Channel: wet, windy and grey. It is a place that is both exotic and drab, dramatic and domestic.

This second son got struck with nerves and epilepsy and instead of becoming a lawyer, became one of the most influential novelists of the nineteenth century. “Flaubert established, for good or ill, what most readers think of as modern realist narration, and his influence is almost too familiar to be visible,” according to James Wood, one of Britain’s foremost literary critics.

But Flaubert was also a luminous stylist. “The morality of art”, he wrote in a letter, “consists in its beauty, and I value style even above truth.” It is odd that an author best known for realism emphasised style above truth. Finding “le mot juste” was his priority. And this subordination of the world as it is to a perfect expression of it points to an important paradox in Flaubert. He became the father of realism by accident.

Flaubert hated the world, mediocre and imperfect as it is, and wanted to transfigure it through his beautiful art. But, in order to do this, he needed to dirty his smooth fingers. Madame Bovary was accused of obscenity, because it was too realistic for the time, but was later acquitted by a French court. “The entire value of my book if there is any,” Flaubert wrote, “will consist in having been able to proceed straight on a hair suspended over the double abyss of lyricism and vulgarity.” This letter was addressed to a woman who played a pivotal role in his life.

In the summer of 1846, the 24-year-old Flaubert, briefly staying in Paris, met Louise Colet. She was a catch: beautiful, 11 years older, a prize-winning poet, and the mistress of the famous philosopher and statesman, Victor Cousin. Over the next ten years, their romance would consist of pregnancy scares and a rich trove — the ones that weren’t destroyed — of erotic, philosophical and literary letters. These letters, like his novel, would seesaw between the lyrical and the vulgar.

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By the time he started Madame Bovary, when he was 29, Flaubert had been travelling through the East for two years. He had grown fatter and clumps of hair had fallen from his head. His face was distinguished by his blonde, drooping moustache. He wanted to write a novel about the classical world, or about the East, something with a flavour of otherness. But his best friend, Louis Broilhet, told him about an old lady he had met in Normandy. She was visiting Flaubert’s mother.

The old lady had had a son named Eugéne Delamare, a former medical student of Flaubert’s father. Delamare had eventually qualified as an officier de santé rather than an official doctor, and, after marrying an older widowed woman who subsequently died, he married a pretty young woman named Delphine. She cheated on him, squandered all his money, and ultimately killed herself. Delamare committed suicide later, leaving their only child in the care of his impoverished mother, who shared her story with Broilhet, who shared it with Flaubert. Madame Bovary was born.

It seems strange that, after a few years of travelling through the Orient, and writing manuscripts about the East and the classical world, Flaubert would dedicate the next five years to writing about a domestic housewife in provincial France. But he kept returning to Normandy. He was a Parisian on and off, but Normandy was his home; while writing Madame Bovary, he lived with his mother and young niece in a house in Croisset. There was a symbiotic relationship between the drab surroundings and the intensity of his imagination. As he put it: “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”

Julian Barnes has described Madame Bovary as the “first great shopping and fucking novel”. Emma Bovary, bored by being shacked up with a mediocre man in provincial France, dreams of Paris. She wants the life of cities, with their “unlimited opportunities for deep emotions and exciting sensations”. Instead, she’s stuck in the small town of Yonville, which is as boring as it sounds, with a bloke who’s not interested in the theatre, can’t swim or fence or shoot. And who can’t make her laugh.

But Emma meets Léon Dupuis, a young clerk. Soon after meeting, they have, in Francis Steegmuller’s brilliant translation, “vague conversations in which every new subject that comes up proves to be one more aspect of a core of shared feelings”. In other words, they fall in love.

Léon and Emma bond in particular over their shared love of reading: “Have you ever had the experience”, he asks her, “of running across in a book some vague idea you’ve had, some image that you realize has been lurking all the time in the back of your mind and now seems to express absolutely your most subtle feeling?”

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Bovary is, among other things, a novel about the experience of reading novels. Léon is reflecting the experience of reading back to us, making us feel, along with Emma, recognised. “Yes”, we think, “we read exactly for that reason: to have our most subtle feeling absolutely expressed.” Emma wants to be recognised by Charles. And she reads her romance novels not because she recognises herself in them — these women lead genuinely exotic lives — but because she recognises her desires through them. They tap into what she wants. The lyrical is tugging away at the mundane.

Dupuis, frustrated by bourgeois conventions, departs to study law in Paris, leaving Emma alone in Yonville. She is then seduced by an aristocratic rake called Rodolphe Boulanger. And after their first kiss, she remembers the “heroines of novels she had read, and the lyrical legion of those adulterous women began to sing in her memory with sisterly voices that enchanted her. Now she herself was one of the amoureuses she had so envied: she was becoming, in reality, one of that gallery of fictional figures.”

These descriptions seem so affected that they invite the reader to question the authenticity of Emma’s feelings. Rodolphe, too, distrusts her pleas for love: “The more flowery a person’s speech, he thought, the more suspect the feelings, or lack of feelings, it concealed.” We are rapt by this tension between Emma’s enchanting fantasies and the devastating blandness that surrounds her. It makes her idealism seem thin.

There is always a cynical gravitational force beneath the lyricism of Flaubert’s prose; everything is brought back down to earth. Rodolphe gets bored of Emma, who “was like all his other mistresses; and as the charm of novelty gradually slipped from her like a piece of her clothing, he saw revealed in all its nakedness the eternal monotony of passion, which always assumes the same forms and always speaks the same language”.

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It is the violence of Emma Bovary’s imagination that, among other things, undoes her. Her wish to escape from provincial Normandy is shown to be pointless: the romantic fantasies she longs for are just as disheartening as the mediocre life she lives. Although Flaubert hated “realism”, he also wrote that “I equally despise that false brand of idealism which is such a hollow mockery in the present day”. He rejected the seductive charm of the Orient, and willingly came back home; he hated Normandy, but the alternative was not better. As a man, he at least has greater freedom to travel than his heroine — he is physically and materially free. But, like Emma, he is spiritually trapped. As he famously said: “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.”

This is what all novelists essentially aim to do: to simultaneously present the world as it is and the world as the characters want it to be. Flaubert achieved this because he was so disgusted by reality, yet the attempt to utterly transfigure it exhausted him. He was annoyed by his finished product. Madame Bovary was serialised in Revue de Paris in the autumn of 1856. Things got off to an inauspicious start when the first ad for the novel printed the author’s name as “Gustave Faubert”. After the first instalment appeared, Flaubert was typically cheerful about seeing his work published for the very first time. In a letter to his friend Louis, he wrote, “Everything in it seems bad.”

If Flaubert believed in anything, it was perhaps the chimera of perfection. He wrote and rewrote in search of it. The early drafts of Madame Bovary amount to 4,500 pages of text; the completed version is just over 300 pages. But, in the end, he was never satisfied. His wish for a complete sentence degenerated into destructive fury. Of Madame Bovary, a work many consider to be one of the finest novels of all time, Flaubert wrote later in his life: “I would like to find some way of making a lot of money so I could buy up every copy of Madame Bovary in existence, throw them all into the fire, and never hear of the book again.”