PARIS (AP) – Hundreds of protesters have marched in Marseille against French right-wing presidential candidate Marine Le Pen, ahead of her final rally in the southern port city.

Some ultra-left demonstrators skirmished with police during the Wednesday night protest. Police set off tear gas to disperse them.

Gaspard Flamant says he fears Le Pen will win the election’s first-round vote. The top two candidates will meet in a runoff on May 7.

The 26-year-old says, “We saw Trump, we saw Brexit … so I’m mistrustful.”

A new poll out Wednesday showed Le Pen and centrist Emmanuel Macron sharing first place.

Opponents of Le Pen and her anti-immigration National Front party also skirmished with police outside a Paris rally this week.

A banner held by a far-left protester on Wednesday read: “Far-rightists can’t be fought in the ballot box.”</s>Marine Le Pen, French National Front political party leader and candidate for the French 2017 presidential election, attends a campaign rally in Marseille, France, April 19, 2017. — Reuters pic

MARSEILLE, April 20 — French far-right candidate Marine Le Pen yesterday accused her rivals of turning a blind eye to Islamic terrorism at her last major rally before the first round of a nailbiting race for president.

Addressing nearly 5,000 flag-waving supporters in the southern city of Marseille, where two Frenchmen were arrested Tuesday on suspicion of planning an attack on the election, the National Front (FN) leader said: “I have been denouncing this terrible poison of Islamic terrorism since I launched my campaign ... and none of my rivals are willing to debate the subject.

“They wanted to stay quiet about this problem, to suppress it, to keep it at a distance like one sweeps dust under the carpet,” she said.

“The silence of the other candidates comes from shame, the shame of being a member or even having led a government which did nothing to lower the threat and even created the conditions for this scourge to develop,” she told the rally, which was held under tight security.

Police fired teargas and arrested four people after around 500 people demonstrated against Le Pen and tried to march towards the rally.

Some of them threw projectiles and firecrackers.

“Terrorist acts have multiplied throughout Europe during the campaign,” she said. “Here in Marseille two fanatics were arrested before they committed odious crimes.”

Le Pen, 48, has spent years trying to grow support for the FN by campaigning on bread-and-butter issues, but in the final days of the race she has returned to its stock themes of immigration and national identity.

In a BFM television interview yesterday she repeated that she would slash immigration, make it harder to get French nationality and crack down on suspected Islamists.

Polls show Le Pen, 39-year-old centrist Emmanuel Macron, conservative former prime minister Francois Fillon and hard left firebrand Jean-Luc Melenchon locked in a tight four-way race ahead of Sunday’s first round of voting.

A new survey published yesterday showed Macron leading on 23 per cent to Le Pen’s 22.5 per cent — both of them down slightly.

Fillon had improved to 19.5 per cent while Melenchon had reached 19 per cent, narrowing the gap with the frontrunners.

The top two will advance to a run-off vote on May 7.

Jean-Yves Camus, an academic and expert on the FN, told AFP that Le Pen had returned to the “fundamentals, and particularly immigration” in the final run-in.

“It’s back to basics,” he said.

“The FN top brass has decided to go full throttle for far-right voters.”

Struggling Socialist candidate Benoit Hamon, whom polls place fifth, attempted to turn around his campaign at a rally in Paris.

Hamon urged voters to “wake up, because you alone can avoid a nightmare for France.”

After a string of Islamist-inspired assaults in France, security to the centre of the campaign following the arrests of two men seen in a video pledging allegiance to the Islamic State jihadist group.

A cache of weapons and explosives was found in the apartment of the suspects named as Clement Baur, 23, and Mahiedine Merabet, 29.

Macron yesterday told a rally that he was the only candidate capable “of ensuring the security” of his countrymen and pledged to “track down all those who have attacked our country or are planning to do so and prevent them from doing harm.”

Le Pen has claimed that her proposals such as expelling any foreigner convicted of a crime or suspected of being radicalised would have helped prevent some of the attacks since 2015 which have claimed more than 200 lives.

Left-leaning Le Monde newspaper has dismissed the claim as “absurd” given that most of the attackers were French, many without criminal records.

“You don’t seek votes on the backs of dead people. It’s a sort of moral red line,” the newspaper said.

French voters have so far been more concerned about unemployment and their spending power than terrorism or security, polls show, though analysts warn this would change quickly in the event of bloodshed.

Some analysts have also depicted the French election as a sort of referendum on the European Union, with Le Pen proposing to a referendum on France’s membership of the 28-country club and scrap the euro common currency.

On Tuesday night, she insisted that the TF1 television channel remove the blue-and-yellow European flag from behind her before an interview.

But Melenchon, her eurosceptic hard left opponent, sought to soften his position on Tuesday night, stating that he did not seek to end the European Union or the euro despite criticising the “ultra-liberal” trading bloc for years.

“Don’t believe what they tell you, ‘He wants to leave Europe, the euro’... let’s be serious,” he told supporters.

The Communist-backed candidate has pledged to renegotiate some of the founding treaties of the bloc, however, which would cast serious doubt on the viability of the postwar project of integrating the continent.

Polls show that a majority of French people still support the EU and the euro.

The election has been one of the most unpredictable in decades and takes place against the backdrop of Britain’s shock decision to leave the EU and Donald Trump’s presidential victory in the United States. — AFP</s>LONDON, April 20 (Reuters) - Jean-Luc Melenchon, the far-left tax-and-spend candidate in France's presidential election, has surged in opinion polls before Sunday's first round vote and yet he isn't the main reason for growing nervousness on financial markets.

Reflecting the topsy-turvy state of politics and financial markets today, it is far-right candidate Marine Le Pen who investors still regard as the greater risk.

In more normal times Melenchon would be their obvious bete noire, proposing a 90 percent income tax band on the country's top earners and expressing openness to taking France out of the European Union.

He has climbed to as much as 20 percent in recent polls from below 15 percent last month, closing in on Le Pen in what has become a tight four-horse race to choose the two contenders who will go through to the run-off on May 7.

That has set off a wave of market volatility. One-week implied volatility in the euro/dollar exchange rate this week is on course for its biggest jump since the euro's launch in 1999.

Compared with the two more centrist candidates, Francois Fillon and Emmanuel Macron, Melenchon is an isolationist; he has promised a referendum on a French exit from the EU if his demands to renegotiate its position within the bloc aren't met.

His manifesto also calls for withdrawal from the NATO military alliance and the International Monetary Fund, vetoing of international free-trade accords, ending the European Central Bank's independence and taking control of Bank of France.

Risky though this may sound for investors, whose confidence is built on the certainty of the single European market and common currency, he is sill not as risky as Le Pen; the National Front candidate is campaigning on a platform of 'Frexit' - taking France not only out of the EU but out of the euro too.

Le Pen has also left open the option for EU renegotiation but on terms that other member states would find hard to accept. Within six months she would want to turn the bloc into a loose cooperative of countries without the euro, a border-free area, budget rules or the pre-eminence of EU law.

Given such demands, markets sense Le Pen holds a much deeper ideological hostility to the EU than Melenchon, whose principal objection is to the bloc's insistence on austerity policies - a view shared by many more centrist voters.

"Melenchon's 'plan B' would be getting out of the EU and maybe out of the euro zone. That's more or less 'plan A' for Le Pen," said Florian Hense, European economist at Berenberg Bank in London. "Le Pen would still be the more nuclear option."

FACTBOX: How 2nd round might shape up:

While Le Pen has led the polls or been a close second for months, most still put Melenchon in fourth place.

However, they also show Le Pen losing in the run-off whoever she faces, as many voters would rally behind her opponent simply to keep the far-right out of the presidency. Melenchon, by contrast, could beat Fillon as well as Le Pen, according to the few surveys that have mapped such a scenario.

Still, Hense puts only a 10 percent chance of either Le Pen or Melenchon becoming president. Many obstacles lie in their path, and even if elected they would have difficulty in securing a parliamentary majority to push through their programmes. Macron, a centrist independent, or the conservative Fillon would be clear favourites if they faced Le Pen in the second round.

Analysts at Morgan Stanley are even less convinced that Melenchon will make it all the way to the Elysee Palace. They attach around a 5 percent probability of his winning, compared with around 15 percent for Le Pen.

Strategists at Citi, however, believe the first round is so close to call that the French election now represents a "volcano" risk for markets, with the "nightmare" scenario being Le Pen facing Melenchon in the second round.

They argue that a victory for Le Pen or Melenchon in the run-off would be likely to trigger a slump of up to 10 percent in French and European equities by the end of June. By contrast, a win for either Macron or Fillon could propel markets up by as much as 20 percent by the end of the year.

"The politics of separation is the greatest risk for the euro," said Lena Komileva, managing director at G+ Economics. "That it is no longer just a Le Pen risk is a grave concern."

Societe Generale currency strategists said the risk of a run-off between the two anti-establishment candidates "is getting slightly less likely", noting Melenchon's poll ranking had failed to break above 20 percent despite the surge.

Analysts at Nomura noted his stance on the EU "looks less aggressive than Le Pen's".

Still, caveats must apply following Donald Trump's victory in the U.S. presidential election and Britons' vote to leave the EU, events which both caught markets off guard last year.

The Nomura analysts noted the combined chance of either Le Pen or Melenchon winning the first round is around 40 percent. That's higher than the probability assigned to both Trump and Brexit at a similar stage before those votes, they pointed out.

"A euro zone break-up would become increasingly likely if a core member were to leave. This would have significant ramifications for global financial markets. A 'risk rally' of the kind we saw after the Brexit vote is highly unlikely if Le Pen were to be elected," they said.</s>French leftist-anarchist philosopher Michel Onfray claims if anti-mass migration presidential candidate Marine Le Pen wins the French presidency, there will be immediate riots in the streets.

In an interview conducted by Swiss newspaper Tribune de Geneve published Wednesday, Mr. Onfray warned that due to persistent demonisation of the Front National and Le Pen in French media, there could be a violent public reaction if she wins the presidency.

“As soon as there is an announcement of her victory, some will angrily march in the streets,” he said.

“For years, she has been presented by the mainstream media as fascist, a Nazi, Petainist, Vichy, antidemocratic. If she is not a republican, then prove it, and then forbid her and her party,” he said.

“Or alternatively she is not the devil. But it is very useful for liberals who can thus divide the power, on the right, and on the left, by waving the red rag of fascism before the noses of the voters.”

The philosopher said that Le Pen may have a tougher time than she thinks against the elites in the European Union. “Once elected, she would face a liberal coalition of Brussels technocrats who despise the people and celebrate only freedom of markets.” He likened Le Pen to Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras who he described as not being able to deliver on his promises.

“Today Tsipras has returned to the ranks and leads the liberal policy desired by the Europe of Brussels. The same would happen to Marine Le Pen,” he said.

“In spite of everything, if she came to power I think there would be an insurrection. In the street, cars burning, people breaking windows, etc.” Onfray noted that a likely scenario could see current President François Hollande “suspend democracy” to restore order and prevent the FN from taking power.

“There exists a number of people in the political class who do not accept the democratic game,” he added.

Whilst many first round polls show Le Pen will likely pull through to the second round of the presidential election, second round polls show her losing to her main rivals. Despite this, many believe there is a distinct possibility the FN leader could win. In a recent article, CNN claimed that many polls are wrong and greatly underestimate the support for Le Pen.

Bobby Vedral, a strategist for investment firm Goldman Sachs, has also called into question the polls saying political correctness may be masking the true support for Le Pen.

Follow Chris Tomlinson on Twitter at @TomlinsonCJ or email at ctomlinson@breitbart.com</s>France’s far-right National Front stepped up its anti-European Union rhetoric on Wednesday, days after toughening its stand against immigration, in an apparent bid to mobilise its core supporters ahead of Sunday’s presidential election.

Opinion polls have for months predicted that National Front (FN) chief Marine Le Pen would attract enough votes to make it to the two-way runoff on May 7 but the gap with other contenders has narrowed, and the rhetoric of her party has sharpened.

“You’ll see, we’ll soon stuff your oligarchic rag in the cupboard,” Le Pen’s second-in-command, Florian Philippot said of the EU flag in a message on Twitter.

He was reacting to the European Commission’s representative office in France, which posted on Twitter: “Proud of our flag, symbol of unity, solidarity and harmony between the peoples of Europe. Let’s not hide it.”

The EU executive was referring to Le Pen’s demand on Tuesday night that French TV station remove the blue, yellow-starred EU flag from the stage where she would be interviewed, leaving just the French blue-white-and-red flag.

“I want to be the president of the French Republic. I don’t want to be European Commission president. I consider the EU has done a lot of harm to our country,” Le Pen told TF1 when asked to explain her demand that the EU flag, a frequent feature in such situations, in the background.

Le Pen on Monday pledged to suspend all immigration with immediate effect if elected, a proposal that does not appear in her manifesto but that touches on a subject which is crucial to her core supporters. It goes further than her previous plans to curb migration.

EU-bashing is popular with grassroots FN supporters, though opinion polls show a healthy majority of French are attached to EU membership.</s>Speaking to supporters in Marseille, Ms Le Pen accused her rivals of being prepared to allow “immigrants to turn France into a gigantic squat”. The Front National leader said: “Are we going to be able to live as French for much longer when entire neighbourhoods are taken over by foreigners?

The Front National’s historically far-right approach has been softened during the election campaign as Ms Le Pen tries to appeal to more voters – but in recent days she has reverted to the hardline tack associated with her father, the party’s founder. Her new approach was applauded by her supporters, who chanted “la France aux français” (France for the French) - a slogan associated with Front National’s xenophobic and anti-Semitic past.

Le Pen’s visit to Marseille comes just days after two French nationals were arrested in the city, accused of plotting an ISIS-style attack on an unknown presidential candidate. The French interior minister, Matthias Fekl, confirmed: "These two radicalised men, born in 1987 and 1993, of French nationality, intended to commit in the very short-term - by that I mean in the coming days - an attack on French soil."

He added that "a definite attack had been headed off”. Le Pen’s Marseille rally was met with protests as hundreds of people took to the streets to demonstrate against the presidential hopeful’s appearance in the city. The protesters, who were mainly young people, sported masks, hoods and even helmets while launching firecrackers in the direction of the police.

Banners read: “The Extreme Right, you can’t fight at the ballot box.” One protester, Marie, said: “Marine Le Pen coming to Marseille, a city of strong immigration, is provocation. I protest because when the extreme right is in power, it will be over.”</s>The 2017 presidential campaign in France has been full of surprises, from François Hollande’s decision not to run for a second term to former prime minister Manuel Valls getting defeated in the Socialist Party primary; from the rise of insider-outsider Emmanuel Macron to the standout debate performance by far-left candidate Philippe Poutou; from François Fillon’s rise, fall, and rise to Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s last-minute surge.

All the twists and turns have increased the uncertainty of an election that was up in the air from the start.

One thing that’s nearly certain is the presence of extreme-right populist Marine Le Pen among the top vote-getters. Her party, the Front National (FN), has gone from a pariah in the 1980s to a major political force. While she and her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, have fallen short up to now, what would happen if she won in 2017?

The answer can perhaps be found in – of all places – a graphic-novel series. Created by writer François Durpaire and artist Farid Boudjellal, the first volume, “La Présidente”, was the hit of the 2015 rentrée (the beginning of the literary season). It was followed by the second volume, “Totalitaire” in 2016, and together they have sold more than 500,000 copies.

Now comes the third volume, titled “La Vague” (“The Wave”), with Durpaire and Boudjellal joined by Laurent Muller. Together the three books provide an enlightening view on the collective anxiety of French citizens as they face a 2017 presidential election whose outcome has never been less certain, and whose consequences for the country and Europe could be profound.

Durpaire, Muller and Boudjellal are well-versed in the mechanisms of power within the FN and have a superb knowledge of the media and political machinations in France. The originality of the series – a sort of retelling of the near future – is to apply a historical methodology and then to put the imagination into action.

In the first volume, the authors imagine that on May 7, 2017, Marine Le Pen is elected president of the French Republic. Boudjellal’s sharply realistic graphic treatment and Durpaire’s insightful text allow the potential consequences of this election to unfold step by step. What seemed politically unimaginable in the second round of the 2002 presidential election – when Jean-Marie Le Pen was soundly beaten by Jacques Chirac – is today only too possible. Every voter has to think about it and to do so, it’s essential to better understand what would happen if she were to win.

The narrative is not a caricature: it applies to the letter the proposed programme of the FN, with direct extracts from official communications. “La Présidente” describes the first hundred days of Marine Le Pen at the Elysée palace, mobilising the political machinery and methods that the FN has employed through its history. The fiction was nourished by the advice of a team of political and economic experts, who make it possible to realistically explore the possible consequences of the FN’s taking power.

The graphic novel also extrapolates security propositions and technical advances already in place. In November 2015, former president Nicolas Sarkozy proposed electronic bracelets and house arrest for “S file” suspects, suspected of radicalisation, and in April 2016, Francois Hollande authorised the use of facial-recognition software. France itself is still under an extended state of emergency after the November 2015 terrorist attacks – one that will last at least through the upcoming elections.

And so we see it all unfold in the graphic novels: France’s exit from the euro, mass deportations, legal preference for French citizens and widespread surveillance through new electronic and digital tools.

And if the Front National wins again?

In volume 2, “Totalitaire,” we’re at the end of Marine Le Pen’s first term in office, in 2022. When the new campaign opens, a surprise candidate emerges from civil society around whom resistance begins to organise. The new candidate is polling higher than the current president, but is a fair election even a possibility? And what of Marion Maréchal–Le Pen, niece of Marine Le Pen and a political power in her own right?

By this point, technology offers an unprecedented capacity for monitoring and control – integrated chips in connected objects, robots, geolocation, and automated surveillance of all communications. We are far beyond Orwell’s “1984”, and the idea of France as a totalitarian country isn’t so far-fetched.

In a televised debate with former prime minister Manuel Valls in 2022, portrayed in the graphic novel, Marine Le Pen says: “You speak to me of responsibility, you who were in favour of passing laws. Me, I apply them.” The events then accelerate on a global scale, with a new US president and dizzying range of geopolitical consequences. In Paris, Berlin and Madrid, new alignments emerge, even as the French president oversees the education of “a new citizen”.

And when the time comes for the election, darkness wins again: the surprise candidate is imprisoned and Marion Maréchal–Le Pen is elected president after a single term by Marine Le Pen.

The third volume, “La Vague”, released at the end of March, unleashes a scenario worthy of the darkest thrillers. At this point, France will have struggled through two five-year terms under the FN. There is resistance, but also unquestioning support. With an alliance between Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Le Pen, is there any chance that democracy can make a comeback?

One way to read this science-fiction graphic novel is as an explicit criticism of the totalitarianism that could result were the FN to take power in May 2017 and the rise of nationalist politicians around the world. It also announces the end of a generation of leaders that has governed in a short-sighted way, as well as – and this is the reading I choose – the failure of a system where insiders reserve all the power and benefits for themselves, while leaving no place for the civility and mutual respect that are the very foundation of politics.

“La Vague”, “La Présidente” and “Totalitaire” are published by Les Arènes, Paris, France.</s>Just as the economic upswing is at last gaining momentum in France, the ultra-left presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon is rising in the polls.

While the centrist reformer Emmanuel Macron remains the favorite to win the Presidential race, there is a risk that neither Macron nor the center-right reformer François Fillon may win one of the top two places in the first round of the presidential vote on April 23rd.

That risk now looms larger than before. For France, Europe and the markets, a run-off on May 7th between Mélenchon and the ultra-right candidate, Marine Le Pen, would be a choice between bad and ugly.

The odds that Le Pen will be the next French president may only be in the 10% range. However, there now is a similar 10% risk of Mélenchon winning.

Following a spirited performance in two TV debates, Mélenchon has risen to just above 19% in opinion polls, on par with Fillon and just 5-6 points behind ultra-right Marine Le Pen (22.3%) and Macron (23.4%) average in the last eight polls).

Mélenchon’s eight-point gain in the past four weeks has come mostly at the expense of the official Socialist Party candidate Benoît Hamon (now down to just 7.8%).

Despite all that, it still seems likely that Macron will make it into the second round and beat Le Pen handsomely on May 7th. Polls for the second round give him a clear and stable 64 % vs. 36% lead over Le Pen.

Although Macron would very likely not win a majority for his centrist “En Marche” movement in the parliamentary elections that will follow the presidential vote (on June 11th and 18th), the expectation is that Macron will be able to forge a pro-reform coalition with center-right and center-left parliamentarians thereafter.

That would be a dream scenario for France and Europe, since it provides wind in the sails of the reform camp.

If Fillon makes it into the run-off against Le Pen instead of Macron, he would probably win the presidency and, like Macron, would be able to forge a pro-reform coalition of his own after the parliamentary elections.

But what if Mélenchon manages to push Macron into third place on April 23rd for a run-off round against Le Pen two weeks later?

Mélenchon would then be the favourite to win. His lead over Le Pen would be smaller than that of ‎Macron but slightly above that of Fillon Vs. Le Pen.

If Le Pen faces Mélenchon rather than one of the two reformers in the second round, the risk that she could win the presidency would increase modestly.

Supported by the French Communist Party and his own ultra-left political movement (“Unsubmissive France,”) Mélenchon espouses hard-line leftist views.

Mélenchon wants France to withdraw from NATO and renegotiate EU treaties, as he wants to purge them of “neoliberal” traits. If unsuccessful in that endeavor, he threatens to quit the EU.

Mélenchon also proposes to end the independence of the European Central Bank (ECB) and use the Banque de France to finance the French budget.

Even so, much like Le Pen, a president Mélenchon would struggle to win a majority in the upcoming National Assembly elections.

France’s traditional center-right do much better at the legislative elections than in the presidential vote. While Fillon’s “fake jobs for family” scandal has hurt his chances to become president, this scandal should matter much less for the center-right candidates at the constituency level.

A president Mélenchon would therefore probably end up mostly as a “lame duck,” unable to push his agenda through parliament.

All that a Mélenchon victory could bring about

Without the support of a prime minister backed by parliament, he would most likely be unable to table a referendum on EU or euro membership.

However, a Mélenchon presidency would be a severe blow to hopes for pro-growth reforms in France and stronger cooperation within the eurozone.

It could trigger capital flight and severely dent investment in France. The confrontation between Mélenchon-type dreams and economic realities could be costly not only for France, but also for the eurozone as a whole.

The economic upturn may suffer noticeably at least until the dust has settled and the political outlook for F‎rance has become clearer.

The experience of Greece, where a radical-left government derailed the country’s nascent economic upswing in 2015, can serve as a warning sign with regard to implementing a radical left agenda. Fortunately, a president Mélenchon would probably not have the power to do so.

Moreover, a French prime minister backed by a potential pro-reform majority of center-right and center-left forces in parliament could still try to move France and Europe forward — even against the wishes of a president Mélenchon.

However, the threat that the president could dissolve parliament would probably make a parliamentary majority reluctant to take ‎unpopular measures such as serious labor market and fiscal reforms.

 ‎

 In addition, a Mélenchon win would exacerbate the crisis of the French center-left. How the various factions — ranging from the supporters of Macron to those of Manuel Valls and those of Benoît Hamon — would re-align after a Mélenchon victory remains a very open question.

A split in the Socialist party already seems very possible. Some left-wing Socialists would probably choose to support Mélenchon, although most would probably not do so.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon shares Marine Le Pen’s euroscepticism, but he is more ambiguous about it.

At home, Mélenchon proposes to increase spending by more than €250 billion a year, to hire more teachers, health workers and police officers (aiming for an increase of 60,000) and raise public sector wages.

Mélenchon also wants to transition from a 35-hour week to a 32-hour week and lower the standard retirement age from 62 to 60.

Unperturbed by past experience and evidence, he intends to finance the surge in spending partly by higher taxes. Mélenchon’s income tax will be even more progressive, with the marginal rate up to 90% for higher wages. He also wants to increase the wealth and inheritance tax.

However, even these tax hikes would only partly make up for the rise in government spending. That is why Mélenchon suggests to take on more debt, with the fiscal budget deficit falling only very slowly from 3.3% in 2016 to 2.5% by 2022.

For more details on his presidential platform, see Mélenchon’s website.</s>Like most serious political reporters, Olivier Faye, of Le Monde, professes little desire to please the people he writes about, and even less expectation that he will. This equanimity has been of particular use in his current assignment covering the Front National, the clannish party of the French far-right, which has been warring with the news media for four decades. Faye and the other reporters assigned to the FN make light of the hostility aimed their way by the party and its supporters, and have adopted some of the cleverest insults as their own. They call one another journalopes, for instance – a mashup of journaliste and salope (whore) – or members of the merdia.

The Front National has fashioned itself as the “patriotic” victim of a bankrupt political establishment and the corps of bourgeois journalists allegedly beholden to it. Marine Le Pen, the FN’s vituperative leader, often refers to her opponents as “the media-political system” or, more succinctly, la caste. This tactic of populist martyrdom is a sort of trap, one that lures the media into the stance of an adversary, called to defend both themselves and a frequently indefensible political class. For years the French press plunged into it with what, in hindsight, appears a heedless and self-righteous sense of mission. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, there were media boycotts of various sorts against the party; yet it only rose in the polls, citing the media’s hostility as evidence of both the conspiracy against it and the potency of the truth it was preaching.

Faye, 30, with ruddy cheeks and modish round glasses, conducts himself with a friendly but slightly fervent air that is common among French political reporters, who constitute an informal elite within French journalism. He fits a longstanding type, but neither he nor his colleagues endorse the old condemnatory approach to the FN. “There’s no attitude that’s more counterproductive, I don’t think,” he said. “Today people don’t want to be held by the hand, to have someone tell them, ‘Watch out, these are bad guys! I, I the great knower, I’m going to tell you what you should do.’” At Le Monde, the conviction is now that “you have to treat this party like any other,” Faye said, “even though it’s not a party like any other.”

It is fair to say this maxim represents a victory for Le Pen. Upon succeeding her father, Jean-Marie, as the FN’s leader, in 2011, she began a strategy of dédiabolisation, or de-demonisation, a broad effort to soften the party’s image and normalise its portrayal in the press. The following year, she won 17.9% of the popular vote in the first round of the presidential election, the FN’s best-ever result. This year, she is expected to take more than 20% and thus qualify for the final runoff. The words Front National appear nowhere in her campaign propaganda.

Dédiabolisation is almost entirely a matter of appearances – the party platform has undergone hardly any revision – and Le Pen and her lieutenants thus scrutinise their press coverage with particular intensity. She is known to call editors to complain, though with Le Monde she tends to call Faye directly. She once left him a voice message admonishing him that she had not “dressed down” a party official, as he had contended in an article, but had quite simply expressed her disagreement. “I see the games haven’t changed, it’s a shame,” she said, affecting a tone of weary exasperation. “Call me back if you think” – she paused, as if summoning her acid – “you’ve behaved in good faith. Au revoir!”

In early September, Faye and four of his editors invited Le Pen to an off-the-record lunch to discuss the upcoming campaign. Such lunches have long been common for French journalists and politicians, though only more recently for the FN. They met at an upscale Danish restaurant on the Champs-Élysées. Faye and his editors were seated at the far end of an enclosed terrace. Le Pen, an imposing woman with platinum blond hair and an ashen scowl, arrived with her bodyguards, who waited at the door, and her longtime media advisor, a bemused and friendly man named Alain Vizier. Le Pen sat facing Faye; Vizier sat at his side.

Le Monde, an afternoon paper widely held to be the country’s publication of record, is the object of particular resentment for many at the Front National; they scorn it as an emblem of the “system”, but seem to crave its approbation nonetheless. After a brief round of pleasantries, and before the journalists had had the chance to begin on their questions, Vizier placed a stack of printouts on the table. Le Pen looked at Faye. “I’ve printed out the last 20 articles you wrote,” she said, as Faye recalled it. “There’s one that talks about real issues, and 19 that have nothing to do with politics.”

She had underlined, in red ink, various words of which she did not approve. “You have a nice little tone of disdain, of condescension,” Le Pen said, her voice rising to the low, imperious bark that is her standard register for interactions with the media. “A little ironic tone that I don’t like.” Surrounding conversations grew hushed; diners seemed to cease chewing, and stare. Le Pen took particular exception to an article about the Front National’s highly publicised recruitment of elite civil servants, after years of attacking them as the embodiment of a blinkered governing class. The article began: “Most political parties cart about their share of contradictions, and the Front National is no exception. Marine Le Pen, who presents herself as the megaphone of the ‘people’ and a paragon of ‘common sense’, ceaselessly denounces ‘the consanguinity and collusion of the elites’, who ‘no longer defend the common good’.”

Le Pen did not like the use of the word “paragon.” She leaned back on the banquette and drew on an electronic cigarette, and left Faye to defend himself. (“Sometimes I use irony,” Faye acknowledged later. “It’s a way of marking a bit of distance, it’s true.” After the lunch, he learned that the stack of articles and the “19 out of 20” accusation form a set piece that Le Pen has used more than once.)

Le Pen went on for about 30 minutes. “She gave us a whole speech about how we were her enemies, because she knew we were going to call for people to vote against her,” recalled Caroline Monnot, Le Monde’s top political editor. “And I told her, ‘Yes, we’re undoubtedly going to call for people to vote against you, probably, but that’s not a big discovery for you.’”

Le Pen’s purpose, it became clear, was to convince Le Monde to publish an op-ed she had written, and she threatened to restrict the paper’s ability to cover her campaign if it did not agree. “That’s where things are screwed up with them,” Monnot said. “That’s just not how it works. It’s not, ‘Up until now I was a pariah, now I’m going to be able to set my own conditions.’ We don’t let anyone set their own conditions.”

Though it sets out to cover the the Front National like any other party, Le Monde does maintain a rule that is particular to the FN. It remains the paper’s policy – like that of various other publications – to refuse to publish op-eds written by FN officials. “The problem we have, honestly, is that if we open the door to taking her op-eds, then we’re helping her put the finishing touches to her banalisation,” Monnot said, “and we don’t want to be in that position.” To refuse on principle is also an imperfect solution, however, accrediting as it does the party’s claim to ostracism and victimhood at the hands of an unaccountable elite – themes that remain the central feature of the party’s politics.



“There’s a pretty perverse and complicated game you have to play with them,” Monnot said. “They’re constantly trying to drag us into this system versus anti-system confrontation. Which we have to constantly avoid getting trapped in.” She offered a metaphor for Le Pen. “There’s a theatre play, and she absolutely wants us to act in this play with her,” she said. “And how do you go about not acting in it?” Once the media have been pulled on stage, whatever they do is part of the show, whether they like it or not.

All politics is storytelling, and all responsible political journalism attempts to account for this, or at least make it plain. Le Pen and her party have long sought to tell a story about the media themselves. This places the journalist in the difficult position of being at once subject and object: they can no longer perform their duties from behind the comfortable myth of neutrality; they are called to speak about themselves, account for their work. And if they are honest, they will be obliged to acknowledge the possibility of contradictions and flaws. Le Pen has intuited this weakness, and understands how to exploit it. If she cannot have what she wants from the media, then, she knows she can at least have her way with it.

She did not dwell upon the rejected op-ed, but rather turned to the slab of raw salmon that had been placed before her, and began to answer questions, pleasantly now. “She’s a politician,” Faye said. Later in the afternoon, Vizier, Le Pen’s media advisor, sent him a playful text message: “Thank you Olivier for that ‘most lively’ lunch!”

Marine Le Pen was four years old in 1972, the year her father, Jean-Marie, a truculent blond bruiser with a penchant for sinister witticisms, was made president of the newly created Front National pour l’Unité Française. The Front National – anti-communist, anti-Gaullist, anti-finance, anti-tax, anti-immigrant, anti-Europe – was peopled by radical Catholics, monarchists, Vichy apologists, colonial nostalgics, neo-fascists and other marginal reactionaries. For the first decade of its existence, it distinguished itself mostly by its insignificance. Jean-Marie won 0.74% of the vote in the presidential election of 1974.

He understood that if the Front National was to grow, it would require exposure in the press, positive or not. In 1982, though the party had won no elections of any note and counted only a few thousand registered members, he wrote to president François Mitterrand to complain that the media was denying him attention. Calculating that any rise in Le Pen’s fortunes would mean a corresponding fall in those of the parties of the traditional right, Mitterrand, a Socialist, directed the country’s three state television channels to give the FN more airtime.

Le Pen made his first major television appearance in 1984, and immediately established himself as a showman of national stature. He had been invited to appear on l’Heure de Vérité (The Hour of Truth), a political programme that, in that era of relative trust in politics and limited television entertainment, drew millions upon millions of viewers. The invitation had been highly controversial; demonstrators and riot police massed outside the studio.

The show began with the host lecturing Le Pen briefly. Though he was “a marginal of the political realm”, the host said, Le Pen was nonetheless “part of the reality of French society”. “This is a fact, and it’s why I’ve invited you this evening,” he said. “This invitation, as you know, is not to everyone’s liking.” Le Pen grinned, before seeming to remember the camera and nodding solemnly. Marine Le Pen, then 15, dressed in capri pants and heels, watched from the front row of the audience.

One of the show’s interviewers, a particularly svelte and haughty man in a grey suit and tie, had come armed with several quotations of dubious taste, attributed to Le Pen or his associates over the years, and asked Le Pen to comment upon them, one by one, in the manner of a prosecutor questioning a witness. One comment, attributed to Le Pen: “When I see the Arabs, with their rumpled look, I wonder if there’s not some biological determinism at work.” In the formal diction he has long employed, and which lends even his most violent or outrageous statements a patina of harmless scholarship, Le Pen claimed that he had never said such a thing.

“This really does seem to me a surprising method,” he exclaimed at one point, “and one that strongly resembles political terrorism.” He smiled broadly and laughed, realising that a clever and damaging line had formed in his mind, and with both hands made a gesture of friendly admiration toward his questioner. “Elegant terrorism, I acknowledge! And plush. But terrorism just the same!”

Le Pen’s poll numbers doubled within a day. Later in the year, the Front National won nearly 11% of French votes for the European parliament, where Le Pen himself became a representative. (He remains one today.) “I think they believed they would be devouring me whole, to the audience’s great delight,” Le Pen, now 88, recalled to me recently, with delectation. “Unfortunately for my opponents, it was the tiger that ate the tamer!” He laughed wheezily.

Within the “caste” Marine Le Pen so disdains, it is habitual to remark that she is “her father’s daughter”. This is meant to indicate that she is not the gruff but compassionate patriot she proclaims herself to be, but rather the leader of an unreformed proto-fascist party, a despot in democrat’s clothing. The literal, rather than political, implications of her filiation tend to receive little analysis. But the central fact of her life is that she is indeed the daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen. For the better part of her 48 years, her father was very probably the most hated man in France, and if ever she forgot this the press could be counted upon to remind her.

He was an inattentive parent and, by reputation, an unrestrained narcissist, and his political activity was at the centre of family life. He revelled in his infamy, and did little to shield his daughters from its consequences. “You’re Le Pen girls for life,” he told them. “It’s not going to be easy, so you might as well knuckle down now.”

In 1976, a massive early-morning detonation destroyed the two apartments the Le Pens occupied in a building in Paris. Marine has described the attack as a moment of political awakening. “I’m eight years old and realise, brutally, that my father is someone well-known and that people are angry at him,” she wrote in a 2006 autobiography. And yet, she continued, there was not “the slightest sign of solidarity or compassion” from the authorities, not so much as “the shadow of a telegram” from the president or any other government official. “And it is then and there,” she wrote, “at the age of dolls and dollhouses, that I become aware of this thing that is terrible and incomprehensible for me: my father isn’t treated like the others, we are not treated like the others.” She suddenly intuits that she is a victim, both of her father’s choices and of an elite that, finding those choices repugnant, denies him and his family their rightful membership.

Marine Le Pen’s autobiography, titled À contre flots (Against the Torrents), is a standard political memoir insofar as it aims to explain its author’s political views as the inevitable consequence of an exceptional life; it departs from the norms of the genre in its embrace of extravagant victimhood. It is a litany of grievances: the media are prominent villains, accused of ginning up “delirious lies”, launching “great campaigns” against the Front National, and caricaturing her father as “a racist, an antisemite, a fascist”. And this alleged misrepresentation, this diabolisation, is doubtless the root of the many other injuries of her life: if only her father and his party had been presented for what they truly were, she would not have been made to suffer.

Philippe Olivier, a member of the party since 1979, knew Marine in her younger years and married her elder sister. “When you’re a kid, and you read vile things about your parent, about the people around him, about what they do, where the quotes are doctored, where the words are doctored – it’s hard,” said Olivier, a personable man with a lisp that renders his conspiratorial worldview less menacing, who is now Marine’s close advisor. “And so she constructed a personality with the press as a life companion, but one that wasn’t always so pleasant.”

By the mid-1980s, a generation of highly politicised journalists, children of May 1968, had risen to positions of influence within the French media, and they seemed to believe it their responsibility to halt or at the very least punish Le Pen and his party. “The whole story of the 80s and 90s was the story of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s electoral rise, and of the media who wondered, ‘What do we do? What can we do?’” said Daniel Schneidermann, who worked as a reporter for Le Monde in those years, before becoming a respected media critic. “And yet they realise that nothing is working. If they scream about fascism, it doesn’t work, it has no effect on voters. Not if they attack him personally, either. If they put out big editorials on the theme, ‘This is bad!’ nobody cares.”

“There was this idea,” said Schneidermann, “that since he wasn’t a politician like the others, everything goes.” They took liberties they would not have allowed themselves with other politicians, whose private lives they handled with marked deference. Le Pen and his wife, Pierrette, began a long and angry divorce in 1984. Pierrette had run off with her husband’s biographer, a magazine journalist who had been living, at Le Pen’s invitation, at the family home. (She left without a word even to her daughters; Marine did not speak with her for 15 years.) The press covered the split with some glee, particularly when, in 1987, Pierrette took revenge upon her ex-husband by posing nude for the French edition of Playboy. Marine was humiliated.

Her father’s so-called dérapages, or “slips of the tongue,” were covered with particular zeal. The most famous of these was what has come to be known in France simply as “the detail”. In a broadcast interview, Le Pen was asked for his opinion of the theories of two prominent Holocaust-revisionists. He replied: “I ask myself a certain number of questions. I’m not saying the gas chambers did not exist; I haven’t been able to see any for myself. I haven’t studied the question in particular. But I think that it’s a mere detail in the history of the second world war.” The country was incensed. “There are details that are monstrous,” Le Monde wrote in an editorial.

Le Pen denounced a “pack of political and media hounds” on a “witch-hunt”, and specified that in the context of a war that killed tens and tens of millions, the chosen technique for the slaughter of just a fraction of these was surely not of terrible consequence. It was the sort of specious, diversionary but superficially logical argument that has always confounded Le Pen’s critics in the media, and they largely preferred to ignore it. He protested, as ever and more loudly, that he was a persecuted speaker of truth.

The following year, 1988, he won more than 14% of the presidential vote, his best finish yet. The media worked themselves into an historic lather; his numbers remained there for a decade.

When Le Pen won nearly 17% of the first-round presidential vote in 2002, qualifying for the first time for the final round, the press was stupified. So was Le Pen. He ran his party as a sort of fiefdom, for his own amusement; there is a widely held view among researchers, reporters and current members of the Front National that he adored the attention he commanded as an agitator and flouter of bourgeois pieties, but that he had no great desire for power and its responsibilities. Serge Moati, a filmmaker who maintained friendly relations with Le Pen, was with him on the evening of his first-round victory, at Le Pen’s manor overlooking Paris. The brawler was suddenly withdrawn, Moati said, seized with melancholy. Le Pen fretted that he had no one to name as his chief of staff, nor as prime minister. “He just wanted to have fun, to play around,” Moati said. His daughter, by contrast, seeks to rule.

Like her father, Marine Le Pen has proven herself an exceptional broadcast personality, born with a blood instinct for the minor hypocrisies of her on-air opponents, and a quick-thinking talent for transforming them into grand theatrical indictments. She has inherited her father’s unconscious smirk, which often serves as notice that she has just concocted some particularly clever bit of verbal violence. Like him, she also tends to jut her jaw and bare her lower teeth when speaking, which can lend her the slight air of a bulldog. The French say she has gouaille, which might be translated as “cheekiness”, but is a term applied almost exclusively to women, evocative of late evenings at a Paris bistro counter, cigarettes, red wine and a certain bawdy self-assurance. Le Pen in action is good, if discomfiting, television.

Her father never seems to have encouraged her promotion within the party. The camera noticed her first, and she built her rise largely upon the strength of her media appearances. The first of these to attract attention was on the evening of the second round of the 2002 presidential election. Le Pen lost heavily to Jacques Chirac, with just 18% to Chirac’s 82%, but Marine’s performance inspired a certain fascination. Journalists, she later wrote, began requesting interviews, wishing to behold “the monster’s daughter”.

In the coming years, no other FN official was granted so much exposure, in print or on air, with the exception of her father, and she was far more pleasant for journalists to deal with. It is true that Le Pen seems to enjoy nothing so much as a good row, and she is known to fume in silence during commercial breaks when she feels she is being disrespected, but she is also viewed as quite personable and inspires far less overt disgust than her father ever did. “We’re all much less on edge,” one top television presenter once told the magazine Télérama. “Before, we had to organise a whole ballet so that our other invitees wouldn’t bump into Jean-Marie Le Pen. We had to do their makeup separately, and install two entrances, so the other politicians wouldn’t have to say hello to him.”

While there were those within the party who believed that the FN’s disrepute brought in more voters than it scared off, Marine Le Pen calculated that the party would have to soften its image if it wished to accomplish anything more than shocking the bourgeoisie. This would require courting the media.

After succeeding her father in 2011, she began to speak more openly of her experiences as a woman and mother, banned skinheads from the FN’s public rallies, and let it be known that “what happened in the camps” during the war was, to her mind, “the height of barbarism”. In 2015, she had her father expelled from the party; he had given interviews reiterating his views about the “detail” and asserting that Philippe Pétain, the leader of France’s collaborationist Vichy regime, was not a “traitor”.

Unsurprisingly, this narrative of fantastic family betrayal, emancipation and political rebirth played well in the press. Most of the coverage was sceptical, of course, and editorials were sure to note that, whatever image Le Pen sought to project, she remained her father’s daughter (though it is widely believed that his expulsion was not a stunt). But coverage of any sort has a legitimising effect, and coverage of a contested claim – here, that the Front National has truly changed – at the very least implies the possibility that the claim is true.

In the country’s last round of national elections, in December 2015, the FN tripled the number of seats it held on regional councils and won more votes – nearly 7 million – than it had in any other election, ever. In its editorial the following day, Le Monde called upon the country to “take action before the catastrophe”. (The party’s successes cannot be explained solely as a phenomenon of the media; but the media has nonetheless been crucial to its rise.)

In 2002, Chirac had refused to debate Jean-Marie Le Pen. This year, for the first time, his daughter appeared in a presidential debate. In the view of party officials, the FN’s dédiabolisation has now been accomplished. In her dealings with the press, Le Pen alternates between the postures of the politician and the insurgent, answering policy questions when it suits her and inveighing against her questioners when it does not. “First of all, Marine set out to ensure that she was being respected by the media,” said Philippe Olivier. “Because, there would be the little journalist who came from who knows where, who’d show up and who would ask a really disagreeable question. Well. We’re in politics, we’re not whores, you know? And even whores have to be treated with respect!” He laughed. “She’s not going to go talk to journalists who behave badly.” (The party, long wary of the “filter” imposed by journalists, was the first in France to have its own website.)

In February, shortly after the official launch of her campaign, Le Pen was interviewed during the nightly newscast on TF1, the country’s most-watched channel. An economist from a thinktank called the Institut Montaigne had been invited for the occasion, to ask Le Pen about her plans to withdraw France from the euro, a decision most mainstream economic thinkers believe would be calamitous. The Institut Montaigne, the economist said, estimated the total cost of leaving the euro to be equivalent to 2.3% of the country’s GDP. “I’d like to remind you, Gilles,” he said, addressing the host, “this represents €50bn.”

“What is a shame, Monsieur l’Expert,” Le Pen began, “is that you haven’t told us just what the Institut Montaigne really is.” The Institut Montaigne, she explained, had been chaired until just a month earlier – “Ah, look, what a surprise!” – by a man who was now campaigning for her opponent, François Fillon, whose economic platform had in fact been penned by that very same man.

Sensing catastrophe, the host interjected, but Le Pen steamed on, smiling. She noted that, furthermore, the longtime director of the Institut Montaigne was a close friend of still another opponent, Emmanuel Macron, and a backer of his movement, En Marche!. “I believe En Marche! was in fact domiciled at the home of the Institut Montaigne’s director!” This was true.

Le Pen collected herself and, with icy didacticism, broadened her charge. “I would like to tell the French: you’re going to be experiencing this same thing for the next two months.” Until the end of the campaign season, she said, “all those who have something to lose in this election” – the media, the “great powers of finance,” her political opponents – would be conspiring to block her candidacy. “You’re going to hear things as utterly insane as what we’ve just seen here.”

The expert nodded, and looked at his shoes, and had not a word to say for the remainder of the segment. “He thought that with his three little graphs and his suit and tie, he’d be able to pass,” laughed Olivier. “She left him standing there in his underwear!”

French political journalism has long rejected the notion that the reporter should maintain great critical distance from the politicians he or she covers. It is the account of the exercise of power that has traditionally been valued in France, not the account of its consequences; and to observe the exercise of power, one must be close. (The media historian Alexis Lévrier has argued convincingly that the explanations for this attitude toward power are largely to be found in the ancien regime.)

When president François Hollande took office in 2012, four of his ministers were involved in relationships with journalists. Hollande himself was living with a journalist named Valérie Trierweiler, with whom he had begun an affair when he was the head of the Socialist party and she was a reporter covering it. This was hardly uncommon – Hollande’s three immediate presidential predecessors were known to have had intimate relationships with journalists as well, and the same is true of countless other government ministers.

None of this is hypocritical or fundamentally wrong, of course, but such proximity does give the appearance of collusion, or at least suggest it as a distinct possibility. For many voters – not only supporters of Le Pen – journalists and politicians seem to be all-but-indistinguishable representatives of a self-satisfied and entirely oblivious Parisian ruling class, and it must be said they have done little to discourage this impression.

Nearly all of the French private media sector is controlled by investors and corporate entities with highly diversified business interests and no historical attachment to the principles of journalistic independence. BFMTV, the country’s most-watched television news station, is owned by Altice, a multinational telecommunications group founded and run by the Franco-Israeli billionaire Patrick Drahi. In October, an Altice media executive left the company to join the campaign of Emmanuel Macron. Before running for the presidency, Macron had served as a senior aide to the president and then as economy minister, and had shepherded Altice’s acquisition of a major French telecommunications operator. The Front National has taken note of all this, and has cited it repeatedly as evidence of BFMTV’s alleged collusion with the Macron campaign.

The television station has taken to publishing statistics to show that Macron is accorded no more airtime than Le Pen. The FN’s accusations are “pulled out of thin air”, Hervé Béroud, BFMTV’s managing editor, told me. “When an individual person leaves a company to join a political campaign, does that commit the entire company?”

Béroud’s reasoning is perfectly sound, and there exists no material evidence to suggest that BFMTV has been anything but fair in its coverage. But given the disfavour with which financiers, politicians and journalists are presently regarded, it is hard to believe the FN’s charges do not resonate with voters. (Antisemitic elements within the party may pay particular mind to the fact that Drahi is Jewish.) The Front National has made similar accusations about Le Monde, whose co-owner, the philanthropist Pierre Bergé, has been a vocal supporter of Macron’s candidacy.

These accusations of partisanship and collusion are only bolstered by the long traditions of both in French journalism. As the country’s daily paper of the right, Le Figaro might be expected to show sympathy for Le Pen’s positions on immigration, say, or French identity. But the newspaper is owned by an industrialist who also happens to be a senator from the traditional right, to which the FN is a threat, and Le Figaro’s editors have been discouraged from covering Le Pen “so as not to harm the republican right”, according to Philippe Goulliaud, who served as the paper’s politics editor for a decade. The paper’s opinion pages remain all but closed to Le Pen. Libération, on the left, refuses to publish either op-eds or interviews with Front National officials. (The paper is also owned by Altice.)

France’s various public television and radio stations, and Agence France-Presse, are controlled by political appointees, and the privately held print media, with few exceptions, depends upon state subsidies for its survival. Which is to say, conflicts of interest, or at the very least the appearance of such conflicts, are rife. The Front National knows this well, and uses it.

On the evening of Le Pen’s combative interview on TF1, her personal assistant was formally charged with embezzlement, the result of an inquest into the Front National’s suspected misuse of funds from the European parliament. Le Pen herself had received a police summons, which she disregarded, citing the immunity granted her as an MEP.

On air, she deflected questions about the charges, and suggested the contours of a plot against her. “This investigation was opened two years ago,” she said. “It’s really pretty surprising that, all of a sudden, two months before the presidential election, there should be this flurry of judicial activity.” She denied any wrongdoing.

Three days later, the banner headline on the front page of Le Monde described the FN’s finances as “a system of organised opacity”. Inside, a series of articles detailed the allegations of campaign finance fraud that have trailed the FN in every election it has contested since 2012. Olivier Faye, the reporter, said his editors felt the Front National had been a bit neglected in the paper’s recent coverage, which had focused most intently on Le Pen’s opponent François Fillon, himself accused of a no-show jobs scheme involving his wife. (The embezzlement accusations against Le Pen hardly make her an outlier among French politicians.)

Le Pen held a rally the following day, in a concert hall on the grey outskirts of the western city of Nantes. Faye was there, and before Le Pen took the stage he wandered the concert hall interviewing her supporters. He sat down a bit abruptly next to a man named Joseph Elie, a retired farmer with blue eyes and black wispy owl eyebrows who worried that French agriculture was being strangled by European regulations. “We’re assailed with rules,” he said, “rules we sometimes can’t even understand.”

“A question that’s totally unrelated,” Faye said. “The scandals that are trailing Marine Le Pen, the financial scandals – does all this bother you?”

“No it doesn’t bother me!” Elie replied. “And I’ll tell you why: because, unfortunately, they all do it. You see Fillon – all of them!” And Le Pen wasn’t accused of personal enrichment, he noted.

“But some of her friends, on the other hand, did enrich themselves personally,” Faye said.

“Yes, some of her close associates. You know, in the affair about the campaigns in 2012?”

“Oh,” Elie said, sounding confounded. But then: “Has it been proven?”

“Well, the justice system hasn’t given a verdict yet,” Faye said.

A man seated nearby, spilling breadcrumbs from a sandwich on to his stained green sweater, asked which newspaper Faye was with. “If you will, France, to me, is a pyramid,” the man said. “At the top of this pyramid, there are a half-dozen very important men, billionaires, and the rest of us are their employees, their parrots. Oh yes! You’re a billionaire’s employee.”

“Fine,” the man said, “but you can’t write whatever you want!”

“I know this will surprise you,” Faye said calmly, “but really, I really do write what I want.”

“At Le Monde?” asked another man, incredulous. “For 30 years they’ve been telling us there are no immigrants in France. While at the same time you can see we’re drowning in immigrants!” His wife, seated next to him, said the Front National was treated as “evil incarnate” by the “immigrationist” media. The man said, “You can tell these papers are really just puppets.”

When Le Pen took the stage, she began with an indictment of the country’s traditional political class, “dream-wreckers”, whose “inadequacy” and “disdain” have condemned the French, at each election, to nothing more than “turning the other cheek”. “I want to transform your oh-so-legitimate anger,” she urged, “into an act of love, for that vital and unique community that is, just like your family, your nation.”

She turned to her prime opponent, Macron, whom she derided as the choice of “the ruling caste”. She smiled a tart smile. “Look, by the way, at the zeal with which the moneyed powers are now openly backing Mr Macron! The moneyed powers, and their representatives in the media. Like Mr Bergé, the owner of Le Monde” – now there were boos, and whistles – “who has put his newspaper entirely in the service of Mr Macron and is using it as a weapon of war against the people’s candidacy that I embody!”

Faye sat hunched at his computer in the darkened hall and dutifully typed out the words, raising his eyebrows in slight disbelief. Such direct attacks on the media have few precedents in French politics. His jaw worked away a bit more quickly at his chewing gum. “Or like Mr Drahi” – more boos – “he too in the service of Mr Macron, who controls numerous channels and numerous papers, all of them entirely devoted to his candidacy!” Le Pen went on. “I want to tell the French to be extremely careful not to let this election be stolen from them – to know how to recognise, in the avalanche of propaganda they’re being served from morning till night, the hand of the system.”

When Le Pen had finished speaking and the lights came up, I spoke with a delicate-looking woman in hoop earrings and a black skirt, who carried a small French flag and whose name was Soizic Robin. “They’re the only ones I believe in any more,” she said of the Front National, though she told me she had voted for the party only since Marine has been at its helm. Jean-Marie, Robin said, was a “disgraceful man”. She said the media coverage of the party had grown fairer in recent years, though she complained the party was still unfairly associated with its former leader, and presented only in a negative light. Two buses transporting FN supporters to the rally that day had been stopped on the road and attacked by masked protesters, for instance. “And I’m sure that won’t be in the news,” she said, but she spoke without bitterness.

Faye called Monnot, his editor. “Really one of the most intense speeches I’ve heard in the past two years,” he said. In the report he filed for the next day’s paper, inflected with a hint of the irony he likes to deploy, he wrote that Le Pen, in order to “counter the accumulation of scandals implicating her,” had attempted “to pass herself off as a victim of some effort to silence her”. Much of the article consisted of quotations from Le Pen’s speech. A small sidebar ran alongside it: “Buses of FN supporters attacked.”

In a broadcast interview this month, Le Pen was asked for her view of a particularly infamous chapter of French wartime history, one that has come to stand for the inhumanity and collaborationist zeal of official France during the Nazi occupation. In July 1942, more than 13,000 Jewish men, women and children were detained in Paris, and deported to their deaths. These mass arrests, now referred to collectively as the Vel d’Hiv (for the cycling arena in which many of the captured were held) were planned and executed not by the Germans, but by the French. In an historic address, Jacques Chirac once proclaimed that “France, that day, committed the irreparable.” Le Pen was asked if Chirac had been wrong to state this.

“I think France is not responsible for the Vel d’Hiv, voilà,” Le Pen replied crisply, glaring at her questioner – the same man, as it happened, who 30 years prior had asked her father about the gas chambers. “I think that in a general way, and more generally, if there are people who are responsible, it’s those who were in power at the time.” She jabbed a pen in the air. “It’s not France. It’s not France. France has been mistreated, in the minds of people, for years. In reality our children have been taught that they have every reason to criticise it. To see only, perhaps, its darkest historical aspects. So, I want them to once again be proud to be French.”

Le Pen had spoken little of French history during the campaign season; the Front National has not always been well-served by its public exegeses of past events. And indeed, Le Pen’s opponents and detractors asserted immediately and with righteous anger that she had outed herself as a despicable revisionist. Le Monde charged that she had crossed a “red line”, that of “the national consensus” on the country’s historical guilt. Macron said: “Some had forgotten that Marine Le Pen is the daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen.”

One wonders what other dark episodes Le Pen would see scrubbed from the country’s account of itself, what other unwelcome truths she would banish. But there was – and Le Pen was quick, as ever, to note it – a slight excess in the outcry, a note of hypocrisy. Revisionism of this sort has been a frequent feature of the politics of contemporary France, and it remains largely tolerated when it emanates from quarters other than the far-right. De Gaulle had insisted Vichy was the regime of only of a traitorous few, while “France” and “the Republic” had survived the war in exile in London, unsullied by the ignominies of collaboration. Every French president until Chirac had maintained the same, and a small number of contemporary politicians still do. François Fillon, her opponent, has in the past rejected the idea that “France” might bear guilt for Vichy. But he did not refrain from adding his voice to the chorus of opprobrium.

“I find this controversy to be artificial and shameful,” Le Pen complained. “Shameful! Because I expressed the position that was General de Gaulle’s, and François Mitterrand’s, and that of all the presidents one after another until Jacques Chirac.”

If only as a technical matter, this was true. And in the eyes of some, perhaps many, Le Pen had once again been made the victim for being right – “mistreated” like the nation itself, compelled toward false repentance by a caste of moralising hypocrites. Indeed, she would be nowhere without them.
• Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, or sign up to the long read weekly email here</s>With two convinced Eurosceptics and an equally fervent pro-European among the four contenders with a chance of reaching the run-off, France’s too-tight-to-call presidential election could conceivably break – or make – the EU.



European officials and diplomats appear generally unconvinced that France, a core member of the bloc, will actually leave – an idea touted, not always forcefully, by the hard-left candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, and his far-right rival, Marine Le Pen.

More worrying, and perhaps more likely, is the prospect of Paris turning its back. The EU would not survive Frexit, though “that seems quite remote”, said one senior diplomat. “But active inside opposition would almost be worse.”

Battered by Brexit and facing a range of other problems including an unresolved migrant crisis, slow economic growth and a clutch of increasingly rebellious capitals, the EU could badly do with some good news.

A victory for Emmanuel Macron, the liberal, overtly pro-EU centrist who, polls predict, will win if he is one of the two second round finalists, would offer France a chance to reform, and Europe a chance to rebound.

“It would show that liberal, pro-EU centrists may yet have a future in European politics,” says Charles Grant of the Centre for European Reform. “Macron wants reforms to pep up France’s economy and strengthen its position in Europe.”

A Macron win could also suggest that, after Britain’s decision to leave and the shock election of Donald Trump in the US, “the demise of liberalism, internationalism and the EU ... may not be inevitable,” Grant added.

It might also – if Macron can implement his planned labour and other structural reforms – revive the stuttering Franco-German motor that has traditionally powered the EU but been hobbled in recent years by France’s ailing economy.

A President Macron would, certainly, make the UK’s Brexit negotiations tougher. He has already warned there can be no “caveat or waiver” to the bloc’s “unbreakable” position that its first priority must be to defend its own interests.

With the eurozone economy starting to recover and after the defeat of the anti-EU Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, Macron – dubbed “Brussels’ sweetheart” by his opponents – would be “a huge boost”, one European commission staffer said. 



Unfortunately for the EU, however, the former banker and Socialist economy minister, who has never held elected office, may be favourite to win the second round – but he is not sure to make it past the first.

The four frontrunners – including the scandal-hit rightwing candidate, François Fillon, who dislikes federalism and wants a more intergovernmental EU, but has no plans to change France’s relationship with the bloc – are so close it is impossible to say which two will reach the run-off.

The prospect of Le Pen, the far-right, anti-EU Front National leader, or the radical left Mélenchon winning has set alarm bells ringing Brussels. While their views on immigration are diametrically opposed (Le Pen wants to pull France out of the Schengen border-free zone), there is little between the two candidates’ positions on the euro and EU membership.

Mélenchon’s so-called “Plan A” is a collective renegotiation, by those who want it, of the EU’s treaties and agreement on fundamental reform, including major changes to the euro. His Plan B, should Plan A fail, is a unilateral French exit – although he has recently sought to calm fears that this is his objective.

The far-left veteran says the outcome of talks would in any event be put to a referendum – something Le Pen has also promised, after a “renegotiation of France’s membership” aimed at “full restoration of national sovereignty” including a return to the franc.

On the face of it, her aims are not compatible with France’s membership of the EU as it currently exists.

If the EU27 appear relatively sanguine about the chances of Frexit and a French departure from the euro – neither would be possible without the other – it is partly because a French president without a parliamentary majority is hamstrung.

This could hit Macron, who – if he won – would need, after legislative elections in June, to cobble together a complex coalition of the willing made up of centrists from left and right and newly elected members of his En Marche! movement.

It would be infinitely more incapacitating for Le Pen or Mélenchon, both of whom are highly unlikely to win parliamentary backing for a referendum on France’s EU membership, which is anchored in the country’s constitution.

Should the new president decide to bypass parliament and France’s constitutional court and go direct to the people, surveys suggest few French voters would willingly embrace the chaos of a euro exit economists estimate could cost €180bn (£150bn).

But even without a full-blown Frexit, a populist, Eurosceptic French president could pose huge problems to the bloc – beginning with Brexit negotiations, on which the EU27 have so far shown a genuinely astonishing degree of unity.

But Le Pen has hailed Britain’s vote to leave as “the first real blow to the old order” and “the birth of a new Europe”, and could certainly be expected to push hard for terms that would do anything but discourage others from leaving.

Mélenchon has also called Brexit “the beginning of the end of an era” and “an earthquake for the EU as we know it”. His campaign programme calls explicitly for Britain’s exit process to be “without vengeance or punishment”.

But the potential for longer-term confrontation goes much further than EU disunity over Brexit terms. Both candidates’ economic programmes, for example, include major public spending hikes that would break EU budget deficit rules.

Le Pen’s plans to tax imports and low-paid labour from eastern Europe would be incompatible with the single market; Mélenchon’s promises to veto free-trade pacts and end European Central Bank independence would be anathema in Brussels.

In the end, it could be that the mere fact of a President Le Pen or Mélenchon, flouting rules, contesting proposals and withholding overall support, would be enough to hobble the EU – when it most needs to advance. For Brussels, few European elections have felt so significant.
The closely-watched CEVIPOF poll shows Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen clinging to a narrow lead heading into the first stage of the election, with Le Pen recently becoming embroiled in a spat with the European Commission after refusing to appear on TF1 while there remained a Flag of Europe in the background.