730 cars burned and 592 arrests before President Sarkozy has been in office 24 hours. Under France’s new and more efficient system for dealing with delinquents, some have already been given prison sentences.

Last Friday, on the eve of the election, Nicolas Sarkozy created a pilgrimage. It’s something French presidents do: they choose a place that has some national significance (but not identifiable with the Catholic Church or the French monarchy) and make an annual pilgrimage there, to soak up some deep mystic force that is recognisably French and which will in turn give them greater inner strength. François Mitterrand chose an outcrop of rock near Macon which is supposed to have been inhabited for the past 7,000 years. Sarkozy chose Les Glières, a plateau up in the Haute-Savoie Alps where in 1944 the French resistance fought a desperate and unsuccessful battle against their own police militia and the German air force and army.

“Alone, he came out of the woods,” wrote Le Monde, showing that they were there first – together with several hundred colleagues. Lucky they were, so they could record Sarkozy’s thoughts: “I want to say to the young generation that if, in two days’ time, they are going to vote it is because of men like [these] who sacrificed their life.” He added he would come here every year to pay his respects to this spirit of resistance in France. It is noble. It is important to remember history.

Why? The obvious answer is that it tells us about the present. If so, Les Glières might be an odd choice: some two thousand French militiamen and police besieged 450 of their own compatriots, whom they termed terrorists. Many of the resisters were communists, so there was an obvious political element to the battle. Today those terrorists are called heroes. The French police failed to overwhelm their compatriots, so the Germans came in with some 4,000 men to flush out and kill all the terrorist/heroes.

There is absolutely no similarity with the 592 young people who were arrested on Sunday night, whom the French police (who bear absolutely no resemblance to the French police of 1944) call delinquents but who call themselves resistants. The context is entirely different: the young men on the Glières plateau in 1944 risked and found death in a country deprived of democracy and all freedom of speech, movement or thought. Those arrested yesterday were protesting against a man elected by a good majority of the entirely free French – their violence is anti-democratic.

The only link is the idea of resistance, a strong and noble tradition in France. José Bové, who will be returning to prison any day now to purge his sentence for destroying genetically modified crops, resists. He has a large following. He quotes the 19th century American Henry Thoreau who went to jail rather than pay a tax he judged unfounded and wrote the now famous essay “Civil Disobedience” whose first title was “Resistance to Civil Government”. As Sarkozy says, it is right to remember history.

Now Sarkozy has gone to Malta for a few days. He wants to rest, of course, but more importantly, as with his pilgrimage to Les Glières three days earlier, he wants to be seen by the world’s press “escaping”, he wants everyone to know that he has gone somewhere quiet so that he can learn, from within, “how to habiter la function presidentielle, to get used to the weight of responsibility which weighs on my shoulders and take the necessary distance to become a man of the nation.” Like a larva metamorphosing into a butterfly, he will emerge, radiant with the full understanding of his role. There is nothing wrong with that, it is just so ridiculously theatrical. So absurdly self-important. He made an enormous fuss about “disappearing”, knowing that the world’s press would immediately start a search and that search would create its own story. It is an indication of how he sees the French presidency – not as a job but the starring role in some glamour movie called French Politics. All the time saying Look at moi! Look at moi!

Thus yesterday, when the rest of France, led by its president Jacques Chirac, was publicly commemorating the victory over Nazi Germany in 1945 – remembering history – the histrionic president-elect was pulling the spotlight on to himself. He failed to turn up for his first presidential duty, accompanying Chirac at the ceremony on the Champs Elysées. His absence was, as he knew it would be, much noticed. On Friday he had declared we must remember the heroes of 1944, the following Tuesday they are not important enough for him to move from his yacht off Malta. It is that continual inconsistency, which some call the meaninglessness of his words, we shall have to watch.

Meanwhile Ségolène Royal’s Socialist Party seems on the brink of melt-down. The older elephants want to re-take control, blaming Royal for the highest electoral score they have ever had – over 1 million more than Mitterrand achieved in 1981 when he became the first socialist president of France, and more than when he was re-elected in 1988. They blame her for doing what they could not, attracting the voters who will rule France tomorrow. The absurd in-fighting of the current Socialist Party is tragic. You cannot renew with the old. More importantly, France under Sarkozy needs an effective, united and strong democratic opposition – as the League for the Rights of Man and other organisations concerned with civil liberties said on Monday. Without it, resistance, civil disobedience, delinquency, heroism or terrorism, call it what you will, can only flourish.
 

Sarkozy on television last night was disturbingly convincing. He was the guest of Arlette Chabot, a highly esteemed interviewer: the night before, she had interviewed Ségolène Royal. Royal had been all right – charming, convinced, clear in what she wants but rather dull. After an hour I left. Sarkozy on the other hand was almost compulsive. Informed, clear and reasonable, he lived up to Royal’s criticism of him that he has an answer for everything, while at the same time visibly trying to counter his wider reputation for nervy, anxious aggression. In both he succeeded - he was almost too good. A viewer asks a question about Alzheimer’s disease, Sarkozy proves he hasn’t got it by rattling out figures of the number of sufferers, the social cost, the medical origins of the disease is and where we are with research. In a similar exercise at the beginning of the first campaign, on the TV channel owned by one of Sarkozy’s pals, so pat were his answers there was strong suspicion he had been briefed beforehand about the questions. It felt like that again last night, though much better disguised.

For it was an excellent performance, and I quite see why anyone listening to Royal one evening and Sarkozy the next would say No contest. To be honest, there isn’t one – on present form Sarkozy is bound to win in 8 days’ time. But while the performance was good, the script was pretty ropey, for there are very worrying aspects in Sarkozy’s vision of power.

One is that his republic (and I think one can call it that, he will control it) will be based on results. While that’s an effective way of assessing athletes, it is a populist, naive way of judging most professions. It results in cheating, moving the goal-posts or covering things up. Unemployment is an obvious example – the present government is under fire for giving partial, flattering results. Sarkozy has promised to reduce unemployment to 5% by the end of his 5 year mandate, so Chabot asked him “And if you don’t achieve that, you won’t stand for re-election?” Ah well, madame, it’s not as simple as that. Indeed it isn’t, and she had missed the main, deeper point that in themselves statistics and simplistic better/worse results are a slippery slope. For example Sarkozy’s pressure on the police to reduce delinquency does two things. It assumes that delinquency is something that should be left between the police and certain young people – that educators, social workers, all those  —ists beloved of the left, have no place in Sarkozy’s republic. Secondly it pushes to police to cheat. In the past if 30 cars were burned in one night this was treated as 30 separate incidents. Now, according to police officers, they are wrapped up as a single event so they can say “Yes, delinquency is falling”. To massage the car burning statistics a little more, Sarkozy last year created a new category: “incendie par propagation”. In other words only the car actually torched by human hand is considered the object of a criminal act, any others destroyed subsequently are merely accidental victims.

The other aspect of Sarkozy’s vision which strikes me as dangerous and on which I feel it was the interviewer’s duty to get clarification, although Chabot did not push it, is the assumption that once he is president he has a free hand to enact all and everything he has said he will do during the campaign. That is to say the democratic moment is the presidential election – after that, sit back and keep your mouth shut because “le peuple have voted me in”. Take the 35 hour week. Sarkozy has made no bones about wanting to reform it, so, he says, if trades union leaders object (as they must), he will tell them “It’s part of my programme, voted by le peuple, you have no democratic right to object. There will be no further debate.” It is the method of the populist-turned-dictator, naive populism combined with twisted logic: last night he said that when he suggested a ministry of national identity all the press protested, but “clearly the press are wrong because last Sunday the French people voted for me”. Q.E.D. A majority brooks no argument: the people cannot be wrong. This is extremely naive because very few of those voting Sarkozy on May 6th will agree with everything in his programme. The logical extension is that anyone who disagrees with one small point in Sarkozy’s programme should on no account vote for him.

Again it strikes me as odd that his interviewers didn’t pick him up on the obvious inconsistencies of his answers: he is against treating railways workers as a special case for retirement – they can retire after 37 years rather than 40 for everyone else. Sarkozy says “In a country where the word Egalité is stuck up in front of every public building, we can’t have that.” Then when asked about encouraging private medicine that principle is forgotten and he is allowed to fudge over a very inadequate answer about freedom of choice. Anyone who uses equality as a justification for a social measure is freely giving away rods for his opponents to beat him with. Even on prime time television an interviewer has a duty to push her interviewee to the roots of his or her logic.

On economic policies he went one further than economic patriotism and state protection – he said the way to prevent companies off-shoring (or moving to Eastern Europe) is to have more family businesses (like Michelin? which lays off workers just like any other), because only family-owned businesses have a total commitment to their work-force and to France. There must be no more investment from foreign pension funds. Apart from the fact that France’s massive debt is serviced mainly from abroad, it is painful to contemplate the state of French industry at the end of his mandate if foreign investment were withdrawn.

As has become usual in this presidential campaign, all serious talk about Europe and international affairs is side-stepped. Never mind, last night’s show will have convinced many that Sarkozy knows what he wants where Royal, fluttering about with Bayrou, keeps changing the parametres. For most people, that is enough.

Are we going to see a Bayrou/Royal contest in the second round of this presidential election? Is that going to be this year’s surprise? After all, in the past two votes, in 2002 and 2005, the French have surprised and shocked the world, surely they are not going to let us down for the hat-trick? And what a shock that would be, knocking Sarkozy, who has led oh-so comfortably from the beginning, into third place at the final moment.

It seems hardly likely, but Sarkozy is in trouble. As we reach the end of three months’ campaign (or in his case 25 years), the electorate – as well as those organs of the media not owned by Sarko’s buddies - is less than convinced by him. Quite simply, more and more people are afraid of him. This week’s “Marianne” magazine, for example, has a cover story “Sarkozy: what the big media don’t dare or don’t want to say.” Marianne has talked to those who know him and come to the conclusion “In some ways the man is mad. And the nature of his madness is the same which in the past fuelled plenty of apprentice dictators.” Well, pace my correspondent of yesterday, that is true scaremongering, although as “Libération” says this morning, none of it is new. But within 48 hours all 300,000 copies of the magazine “Marianne” had gone from the newsagents – probably bought by Sarko’s boys.

Part of what people are afraid of in Sarkozy are things beyond his control, they way he looks, for example (although Ségolène apparently had a jaw-job last year to improve the way she looks on camera). As exhaustion and tension become more evident on his face, his pointy ears and eye-brows do make him look more and more like the little devil which has been his caricature in “Le Canard Enchainé” for years. Indeed recently “Le Monde” has taken to publishing photos of him that support that diabolic, or perhaps simply Machiavellian impression. Is that why, suddenly in these final days, he is trying to convince us of his devout Christianity? Of course he may be, but why bring it out now in a rather saccharine way? The secular French do not like their politicians to mix religion into their professional life, the way Tony Blair does.

Another thing he can’t do much about is his nervous, staccato manner, his facial tics and grimaces. A president has to have enormous energy, yes, but at the same time a certain serenity to cope with crises. Stories of Sarkozy’s short fuse, angrily throwing things at his advisors, abound, as do his over-hasty use of words like “scum”. Chirac did himself and France great harm by his ill-considered use of words, as when he tried to teach eastern European countries how to behave, or told Tony Blair that he was badly brought-up. Now, as the vote approaches, Sarkozy is desperately trying to show that underneath it all he is Mr. Nice Guy – but it looks as though it’s too late. Ironically it is Sarkozy who gets more dictator-like moustaches on posters than Le Pen.

People who have worked with him have told me that he is his own worst enemy. Amongst other things, Sarkozy’s battles with Chirac have left their scars – on the public’s memory. We all know he’s betrayed his mentors (not that they were worth much either), that Chirac hates him. Now he himself is close to the top, he’s equally ruthless with those who, for years, have helped and supported him, like Brice Hortefeu, cast into Outer Darkness for speaking out of turn. The public don’t care about Hortefeu, but they see the brittle tension, the undisguised stress, and they worry if that’s what Sarkozy’s like now, what will he be like in a few years’ time? Will he really be able to cope calmly with the delicate problems we know Brussels is going to throw at him? Then they look at Bayrou who remains relaxed, smiling, helpful despite the reverses of the campaign.

Are Le Pen and Sarkozy discussing a possible alliance? In an interview today with Le Figaro, Le Pen admits that he has been to see Sarkozy twice, “to discuss technical election problems”, adding that he has no personal bone to pick with Sarko as he had with Chirac. “If Sarkozy says he wants to come closer to us, why not?” Le Pen said. ”It would depend on whether it was in the national and my party’s interest. In any case, we have no preconceived feelings, either against him or anyone else.”

It is intriguing if Sarkozy is holding out some sort of olive branch to Le Pen: “Chirac didn’t want to talk to us. If Sarkozy wants to talk to all the political parties including the Front National, it’s a new era, certainly,” adds Le Pen. If Sarkozy finds himself against Bayrou in the second round, the polls show Sarkozy beaten each time. To win he would need Le Pen’s 15 - 20%. Of course he need not ask for it, Le Pen could appear to make the offer spontaneously, but even so it would be a very bold, desperate move for Sarkozy to accept, since the outcry - and despair, including internationally - would be enormous, tainting Sarkozy’s presidency from the start. It is almost inconceivable he would do it, since he would probably lose more on the moderate right than he would gain from the extreme. But then again, in today’s Libération Sarkozy seems to be preparing the ground, saying that all the main candidates have moved further right - with the sole exception of Le Pen, implying that Le Pen is now more moderate, and adding “Just because Le Pen touches something does not mean it has to be forbidden.”

I have never met Nicolas Sarkozy, although not for the want of trying. A few years ago, when he was still unknown in Britain, I wrote a portrait of him for Prospect, phoning his press office every day for maybe three weeks, trying to get an interview. He is a fascinating, if mildly repulsive man, reminiscent of a character sprung from the mind of a Jacobean dramatist, and ever since that time I have listened carefully to those who know him – Charles de Courson for instance telling me last week that so divisive is Sarkozy’s nature that if he gets in, the country will collapse within two years. Leaders naturally bring people together, and Sarkozy so far has shown himself the opposite. So Michel Onfray’s blog in which he describes meeting the candidate was a must-read.

For those who can’t face 3,113 words in French (and you thought I’m long-winded!) I will give a résumé (meaning shortened version, for those with no French at all). Michel Onfray is a 47 year old philosopher, already cited in this blog some time ago, who achieved high-profile with his book La Traité d’Athéologie, which sold a remarkable 300,000 copies. Put simply, he is a hedonist, believing in the present, not in the dream of a rosy future, whether religion-based or utopic. He believes in the value of our senses, that we should know the world and see the world as it is. Anyway, the French magazine Philosophie asked Onfray to interview Sarkozy.

On his blog, he describes the meeting: Onfray is accompanied by two of the staff of the magazine, Sarkozy by two advisors. “A stormy beginning. Aggression on his part. He paces round his cage, looking, weighing me up, judging. A great wounded animal, he has read my blog and looks me up and down.” Onfray recently started a blog for this election, and early on he compared Sarkozy to the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood. In the same way that the wolf disguises his grey fur with the grandmother’s nightdress, the lupine free-marketeer Sarko has dressed himself up in clothing of the left, claiming to believe in the Republic and its social, caring values. It is for this comparison that the following scene is enacted: “His legs are crossed, one of them incessantly twitching nervously, the foot never stops moving…..First blow with his paw, claws out, then a second, a third, he can’t stop, lets himself go, aggressing, hitting, striking hard, talking to himself, a flow of words impossible to control or canalize. One, two, ten, twenty autistic sentences. His cabinet director and colleague watch and listen to him impassively. I can imagine them present at a heavy [police] interrogation, wearing the same mask, the mask of a person in authority watching someone die without a flicker of emotion. The monologue continues, interminable torrent, bitchy comments thrown out like gall from a sick, bilious man or the venom surging through the body of a person intent on murder. Boasting, provoking, sure of his ground as he pushes his adversary to fight back, he says in essence: “So you’ve come to see the great demagogue, you who are nothing whatsoever, you throw yourself into the wolf’s jaws!” I say something, it is torn apart, destroyed, broken, rejected….. I try again. Same treatment, a torrent of acid words. I try again, same thing. I begin to find it’s going on a bit long…”

As Onfray says, how, if one has wanted, since the cradle, to be president of the republic, if one aspires to walk with the great of this world, be the head of the army, have a nuclear arsenal at one’s disposal, how can one turn like a mortally wounded animal on someone just because they wrote on their blog something mildly critical. All Onfray said in his blog was that Sarkozy had recently converted to Gaullism, the idea of the nation and the republic. “In fact the whole of the first half hour were a hysterical piece of play-acting of someone lost body and soul in a dance of death around a ritual victim, while round about two men from each camp impotently watch this primitive scene.”

Sarkozy, called away to the telephone, returns calmer, and under the influence of his minders begins to talk about the matter in hand, an interview about that area thought to be the monopoly of all educated Parisians, philosophy. Sarkozy announces that he firmly believes that we are born either good or evil and that whatever happens to us, everything is determined by nature: “I tend to think,” says Sarkozy quoted by Onfray and later in the magazine, “that one is born a pedophile…. There are 1,200 or 1,300 young people who kill themselves each year, and not because their parents didn’t look after them. But because they had a genetic fragility…take smokers: some develop cancers, others don’t. The first have a hereditary physiological weakness..” For Onfray, believing that you are controlled by your genes in this way is terrible, a pure piece of American stupidity.

Sarkozy then says that he has never heard anything as absurd as Socrates’ “Know yourself” “This admission turns me to ice – for him. And for what it says about him….In other words this person who wants to lead the destinies of the French nation believes that knowledge of oneself is a vain undertaking?” Onfray reminds his readers that the last three heads of state have all had need of expert psychological help at different times during their mandate. Clearly Sarkozy feels this sign of fragility is not for him.

The description of the meeting reminds me inevitably of the interview with Jacques Chirac told by the journalists from the New York Times, retold on this blog. In France there is a constant and ritual dance between politicians and journalists, who are not allowed by law to comment on a public person’s private life, and so find other ways to undermine their credibility. The world of blogs, a French samizdat, is of course, ideal for that. The comparison, as they say in France, is not anodyne. I cringe to imagine France under Sarkozy, if mild criticism provokes that sort of anger, what will happen to the already acquiescent French press? Imagine Sarkozy interviewed by John Humphrys – he would provide the excuse for bringing back the guillotine. If Sarkozy is elected we shall have a lively passage, as a ferry captain told me once, setting out across the Channel in a force ten gale.

The campaign enters its third and final phase. All the candidates are declared, they have all expressed their policies. They each know their rivals’ strengths and weaknesses, now it is a matter of convincing us that they are better than the others. A study showed recently that only 35% of the electorate are die-hard partisans of one party or the other, sure of voting the same way they have always voted. They rest wait to be convinced.

What is strange, for an outsider, is to see the political fragility behind all but the UMP candidate, Nicolas Sarkozy. This election is about voting for an individual not a party, but the political mess behind two of the principal candidates makes people wonder whether and how they will be able to govern. Take Segolene Royal, for example, the Socialist candidate: you only have to watch the leader of her Party, Francois Hollande, to realize that all is not well. He travels about the country addressing crowds, but nobody much takes any notice, wondering why: they don’t want him, they want to see the candidate, they want to touch the hem of her skirt as she passes, or be touched by her in some way. The leader of the Socialist Party is seen and treated as an irrelevance in this election.Francois Hollande is in a doubly odd position in that he is the father of Segolene Royal’s children and her party’s leader, yet there appears to be no rapport between Royal and Hollande at either level. They live separately, a very knowledgeable MP I talked to at length on Friday continually referred to Royal as Hollande’s ex, yet in the book she publishes this morning she tries to scotch that rumour by waxing lyrical about her love for Hollande and how much he supports her. But she doesn’t convince: “I realize that the situation is unusual,” she says, ”and I understand that it makes people curious. But outside the fact that it is my private life [which the French press does not talk about] I can, even so, tell you one thing: I find my children absolutely amazing. They support me, each one in his or her own way. Francois too.” A sort of appendage to her domestic thought as he appears to be in her political. But it’s very important, for how will she run the country if she has in two senses broken with the party leader, who is, one assumes, the party’s figure-head and principal policy chief. It is no secret that Hollande is far closer to the party elephants than Royal, yet to form a government she must rely on them. There was a much-publicized moment a week or two back when she went back to them, but they did nothing for her ratings so she moved away again, trying to recreate the excitement she generated last year. Voters are human beings, most have had to cope with relationship problems, work problems, they project their worries on to the candidates and ask perfectly normal questions such as Can it work? They also know that, under the 5th Constitution, the president of France is one of the most powerful positions in the world, the candidate has to be 100% convincing.
Francois Bayrou in the centre is the other candidate who fails to convince partly because of the political uncertainty behind him. Like Royal, what he stands for is perfectly fine, interesting and in its own way workable. But what about the rest? He at least is the head of his party, but he has a only a handful of MP’s. He needs 290 to have the slimmest majority in parliament. He talks blithely of working with the best on the left and the best on the right, cynically assuming that today’s rivals will drop their life-time allegiances in order to have a piece of power. He’s a clever man and he knows his colleagues, so he is probably right, they will, but it says little for them if the offer of a ministry will make them change their convictions. Will the public believe them in their new role? And how long will their conversion last? The point is, Bayrou has four weeks to convince us all that it’s possible. He really has to sell that as a water-tight workable proposition. Knowing how volatile and Machiavellian many French politicians are (compared to their rather staid British and American counter-parts), I think many doubt his capacity to hold them together. He is an interesting man, with good ideas, probably better than his rivals’, but he is not a born leader – in many ways like Gordon Brown.
That leaves Sarkozy. He is the leader of his party, which is huge, well-financed and solidly behind his ideas. He has the backing (albeit tepid) of Chirac, which most of us would consider a curse rather than a blessing. But interestingly with Sarkozy, while the party’s policies are reasonable, many consider the man is not. He is divisive, he rules by division, he makes more enemies than friends, whom he uses only for what they can give while they can give it. The same MP I was talking to on Friday, who knows Sarkozy well and is not entirely against him, said that if he is elected the country will be on the rocks within two years. Sarkozy’s ideas are not his own, he takes them from anyone who seems interesting, which means that he changes them the next time he meets an interesting person. He thinks that leadership is rushing about at top speed, gesticulating, shouting. He is intensely disloyal – one only has to look at the man who guided him successfully to where he is now, Brice Hortefeu, who a month ago was put firmly in a cupboard to which only Sarko has the key. It is precisely this histrionic and unpleasant behavior amongst the entire political class which the French want to change. They want their politicians to deal with (which means cure) the problems facing France – its massive debt, simply paying the interest on which (40 billion euro a year) soaks up all income tax and costs more than the entire education budget; unemployment; pensions; immigration and its corollary, integration; globalization which terrifies the French but is a fact of life; religion, which to everyone’s surprise has become an issue after 100 years’ lying low. The list goes on and on, but the candidates have less than 4 weeks to address them. Many voters feel that in the last two and a half months they have not even started…..which means they may give up in disgust before voting day.

A new element in this election campaign is national identity. Suddenly these two words have sparked new controversy and therefore new life into the story. The phrase was pushed to the forefront of debate by Nicolas Sarkozy, who announced on television that if elected he would instigate a ministry of immigration and national identity. He had two reasons for doing this: firstly he has realised that recently people have stopped talking about him, he has just become part of the landscape. For any presidential candidate this is bad, for a man like Sarkozy who has a need to monopolise the conversation, it was a disaster. Instead, everyone was talking about François Bayrou. Bayrou is pushing up between Royal and Sarkozy, taking the middle ground, so Sarko felt obliged to move further right, to poach Le Pen’s extreme right voters. Hence a ministry of immigration and national identity. 

A growing number of Le Pen’s voters are not hard-core militants at all, but former members of the Communist party, plus rurals disappointed by Chirac’s Gaullism and finally what the French call ni—ni-istes, that is, those dissatisfied with recent governments of both left and right. Sarkozy believes he can woo these floating voters back to him. But of course the further right he moves to attract them, the more he offends those in the centre, who flake off to Bayrou. In theory – because in fact many of those saying they are going to vote Bayrou have not made up their minds. When the voice on the end of the phone asks them who they’ll vote for, they think  it’s trendy to say Bayrou - indirectly it gets them into the news. They become one of those in the headlines – Bayrou’s secret army.
The words ‘national identity’ may seem anodyne to some, but not to the French. Like Royal’s favourite phrase ‘l’ordre juste’, it turns many French people apoplectic. Both are seen as staples of the right or far right. It is a very odd thing, to an outsider. Say the word ‘nation’ to a socialist and it’s like stroking a cat, they love it; say the word ‘national’ and they bridle like a horse; say the word ‘nationalist’ and they’re out on the street waving banners and burning effigies. Such are the subtleties of the French language and the pitfalls of being a foreigner. The nation is the key to republican thought (good); someone who believes in his own nation is the epitome of the far right (bad). I am told that national preference, one of Le Pen’s disputed policies, actually became law in 1932, a socialist measure put on the statute book by Roger Salengros, but I cannot find any confirmation of that.

But what about simply ‘national identity’? What does it mean to be French? Are we talking about learning the history of the country, the structure of its government, the function of its courts? Is it sufficient just to sit an exam to be French? Again, it depends who you talk to - and comments from French readers of this blog would be most welcome. According to Marine Le Pen, daughter of the veteran leader of the Front National but by no means merely his echo, it is a feeling, deep within, and like love (she added with a sparkle in her eyes) you know when you are affected by it, although you cannot necessarily define it. It is not about learning French history at school, it’s about sharing a common history, a common future and, for her very important, a common language. For her father it goes further (or farther):”I think a foreigner who wants to adopt French nationality begins to become truly French only when the bones of his parents dissolve into the earth of France,” he told me last week. “It’s at that moment that one begins to belong to the nation charnellement.”(A word for which I can’t find a quick equivalent – carnally doesn’t work, though it can do in other circumstances, viscerally, perhaps, intimately not really). Jean-Marie Le Pen talks in images, which I have to say makes talking to him vivid, alive and sometimes very funny. Having perhaps tested out his ideas on me, he spoke at length yesterday in the house where he was born in Brittany about what it is to be French and why it is important. He said the electorate should know where the candidates come from, where their roots are. This is clearly provocation to Sarkozy (Hungarian father, Jewish maternal grandfather, he himself brought up in a smart suburb of Paris) and Royal (born in Senegal, Africa).

If a week is a long time in politics, ten days is an eternity. I have been rushing round France interviewing Marine Le Pen and her father Jean-Marie, then writing about the Front National for Prospect Magazine, at the same time setting up a documentary film about the role of the Ecole Nationale d’Administration, France’s post-graduate school for high-flying administrators. Something had to wait, and it was the blog. I shall return to both these subjects at a later stage, but first try to get back into the election.

A milestone in the campaign has just passed: the 16th March, the day when each candidate had to present his or her 500 signatures to the Conseil Constitutionel. For the minor, independent candidates it is of course an important day, but for most of us it is a totally trivial event - simply because it is such a strange and in many ways unnecessary ritual, over-blown by the press. Most candidates, major and minor, have already been campaigning hard for two and a half months, one has sold his flat to raise funds for his campaign, all have invested enormous time, energy and naturally money. Then, as from today, some 35 candidates are told they have wasted their time, energy and money - and our time too – they must pack up their campaign stall with nothing to show for their effort.

The idea of getting 500 elected representatives to endorse a candidate is to prevent loonies standing for president. But why shouldn’t a loony stand if he or she wants to? Oh, because it dilutes the vote – instead of voting for sensible candidates, people will vote for loonies. Ummm – what? That says something very strange indeed about either how the elite see their compatriots (“they are so stupid they can’t tell the difference between a loony and me!”) or the quality of the serious candidates. The British parliamentary elections have, over the past 40 or so years, had candidates for totally impossible parties – such as Screaming Lord Sutch’s Monster Raving Loony Party. They attract a few votes, they lose their deposit and have no effect on the final result. In other words if an eccentric no-hoper is going to campaign for two and a half months, why not let him/her continue for just the remaining month and be done with it? Or prevent them standing at the outset.

Anyway, the day is past and we can get on with looking at the main candidates, who had no problem getting their signatures. François Bayrou has been climbing vertiginously close to Royal and even Sarkozy, but may have stalled. From the outset he has presented an intriguing programme, a Third Way in all but name. Both his main rivals have resorted to some pretty lousy tactics to discredit him. These are candidates who at the outset declared themselves to be a new species of politician, not wrapped-up in petty sniping and back-biting. But despite such good intentions, nothing much changes: the Socialist Party is, as always, riven by egos as their leaky ship lurches dangerously and threatens, like last time, to sink. Two of Ségolène Royal’s key advisors, Laurent Fabius and Dominique Strauss-Kahn, denounce each other in public, which bodes well for any government they might eventually form. Meanwhile Royal’s former economics advisor has published a book telling us what a self-centred, unappealing person the Socialist candidate is.

The UMP camp is little better: Sarkozy with much pomp brought on board the venerable Simone Veil, former minister of health way back in 1975 (again, this is the man who said he would break with the past). After a public show of hugs, kisses and mutual congratulation, Mme Veil has more recently attacked her new leader for proposing a ministry of immigration and national identity. It is well known that Sarkozy has a terrible temper, sometimes hurling furniture across his office at his luckless assistants, that sort of thing. Recent reports abound of his screaming at his staff, calling them all the names under the sun because he is slipping slightly in the opinion polls and Bayrou is closing in. Again it bodes well if he elected president: it also says a lot about a man (or woman) if he blames his staff for the fact that the public are losing faith in him.

Bayrou still provides the enigma of the election. Is his popularity going to last another 36 days? It’s far from certain. In the last presidential elections Jean-Pierre Chevènement had a similarly heady experience, rocketing in the opinion polls during the campaign, but thenflopped terribly at the actual vote. People notoriously give deliberately misleading answers to pollsters – it’s all part of the fun. Anyway, a third of the French electorate cannot take part in these polls because they don’t have telephones – and all these polls are done over the phone. People either no longer have a fixed-line phone, depending instead on their mobiles, or their fixed line is for the internet only. So that at least provides us with suspense until the last minute, for always, in the background, is Jean-Marie Le Pen, who in 2002 surprised/shocked everyone by beating the Socialists. There is no reason why he should not do the same again. I spent a very interesting hour with him in Strasbourg last week: he was charming, witty and seemed remarkably full of energy for a man of 78. His policies, well, they please some and listening to him it is not hard to understand why. They follow a certain logic which is either yours or isn’t. But more of that, and his daughter, another time.

An interesting article in the citizens’ newspaper, AgoraVox reacting to Nicolas Sarkozy’s Call from London. It’s written by a French chap, Stephane Rossard, who lives in Cape Town.
“Sarkozy says to us “Come back”: we say “Do something!”
There is of course a basic difference between the Brits who have moved to France and the French who have moved out. Whatever their individual reasons, most of the British taking up residence in France tend to be in the second half of their careers, often well into it, whereas the majority of French women and men who leave France are just beginning theirs. Another basic difference, which Stephane Rossard’s article unconsciously highlights, is that at some moment, fairly early on, I had to decide whether my principal residence was in France or in Britain. As soon as I ticked the former, I lost the right to vote in Britain (even though I still had a flat in London): my two expatriate French step-sons can still vote for a French president even though they have been living outside France for several years – as I guess M. Rossard and others can. Until I take French nationality, I am voteless (so this blog dedicated to the French elections is rather like a sex-manual written by a eunuch - no, that’s not true! I have vague memories of what it’s like inside a polling booth).
Back to M. Rossard (whose text I am ruthlessly pillaging, with sentences taken out of order (apologies), to keep brief, but if your French is OK, read the article): “The number of French leaving the country has risen by 40% in 10 years…..Some of course go to the UK, but many go elsewhere……It is one of the biggest waves of emigration France has ever known….This is a reality minimised by French politicians, either brushed off as irrelevant or ignored. It’s about time a candidate took an interest in us.
“However, calling on us to come back is not enough: French people abroad will judge on the evidence whether it’s worthwhile coming back or not. The future president is going to have to prove himself to convince us. For we are scalded cats. We know all about promises. It’s because in the past they were not kept that we left, and most of us have only a lukewarm desire to return unless there is a strong signal or something done.”
A theme I hear more and more from the current campaign and which I shall probably start repeating in different ways is: despite what they say, the principal candidates are completely out of touch with most of their compatriots.
Finally M. Rossard gives the address of a web-site dedicated to ex-patriot French people: http://francaisdumonde.canalblog.com/

On Wednesday, Nicolas Sarkozy was in London, drumming up support amongst the French ex-pats. I knew a couple of friends were going, so I asked them to send in their impressions. I was surprised nothing came in yesterday, the day after the event, then this morning this came from Tom Freke, a financial journalist:

Sorry for the delay … the reason for it is that I couldn’t get into the event on Tuesday and have been waiting to hear if a friend of mine did and I could get something from them. I have just found out they didn’t either, but thought they knew someone who had……

There was a huge mass of people outside at 6.30, when it was meant to start, but the people that were allowed in had already been let in. The crowd was left there, people thought, either for the TV cameras or because they didn’t understand the form of English shouted by the police …
“We are frogs not sardines” shouted one indignant woman, on being squeezed in.

Looking at the mess of people standing outside the venue, someone said “You can tell the people aren’t English, where’s the queue?”

Here is another comment from someone I do not know, but who was clearly trying to get a peek at the great man….

I was in that scrum too. I got within 20 people of getting in but they shut the doors and then said not one word. The local UMP deliberately over-invited in my view (a) to avoid the embarrassment of a half-empty room and (b) assuming that didn’t happen, to show crowds of young people gagging to see the great man. On the other hand, it was a good speech as you can see on the video/international page at www.sarkozy.fr.