France Sighs 'Ouf!'

...A majority of Le Pen advocates, though, were openly attracted by his xenophobic offensive against immigrants and his championing of "national preference...

...He also denounced Jospin's move to grant greater devolution of authority to Corsica, which he regards as a first step toward "dismantling" French unity...

...This is precisely the kind of issue that seems important in highbrow Parisian circles but leaves people in the rest of France mostly indifferent, if not downright antipathetic...

...Communist trade-union leaders and shopkeepers teamed up to say "no" to fanaticism and "yes" to democracy...

...The writings of Michel Foucault and Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as the Marxist theorizing of the 1960s and '70s, have left their mark too: Lawbreakers are often depicted as victims of the "system...

...Such proposals would have been denounced as reactionary some years back...

...Although Chirac, usually a hesitant speaker, had reached new rhetorical heights that echoed Charles de Gaulle's best speeches, his overwhelming victory was due more to an unprecedented joining of forces against Le Pen...

...The single-minded campaign to oppose Le Pen may only have made his supporters more stubborn...

...This was virtually the same proportion as on April 21, with slight geographical variations...

...Disagreement over Corsican policy had caused Chevènement to step down as Interior Minister in 2000...

...At a soccer match between France and Algeria last year, teenagers from France's Algerian community booed the "Marseillaise," waved Algerian flags and angrily swarmed the field after France won...

...It is not a coincidence that Raffarin, the new Prime Minister, has named a former director of the gendarmerie his principal aide...

...Media commentators and ordinary citizens alike tried to understand what had driven 18 per cent of voters to endorse him in the second round...

...In addition, Chirac wants to form a corps of Justices of the Peace to deal swiftly with petty offenders who harass people in their daily lives...

...As if to illustrate the gap separating the political and intellectual classes from a substantial proportion of the populace, the same page in Le Monde carried another column, signed by a group of writers and actors including François Mitterrand's daughter, Mazarine Pingeot...

...In 1968 France flirted with heady revolutionary ideals...

...They aspired, albeit confusedly, to build a free-for-all utopia with the red flag flying in place of the tricolor and the "Internationale" supplanting the "Marseillaise...

...Television viewers nationwide were shocked by the display of anti-French sentiment from youngsters who were mostly native born...

...only in the evenings did they gather to chant their rejection of racism and the National Front...

...Janice Valls-Russell writes about French and Spanish affairs for the NL...

...Of course, that does not mean the country went to bed with visions of neofascism and woke up in the grip of Gaullist fervor...

...Meanwhile, observers grappled with the shock of the Le Pen phenomenon...

...A few Jewish leaders privately admit that some members of their community—distressed by the apparently endless spiral of terrorism in Israel and by its reverberations here—may have voted for Le Pen in the first round...

...During the month preceding the elections, over 600 attacks on Jewish targets were reported in France...

...Condemning what he considered the "irresponsible" farLeft ideologies of the Trotskyites and Greens, Chevènement reasserted "Republican values" and argued for increased attention to law and order...

...Jews, Muslims and Christians marched arm in arm...

...After the results of the first round were announced, though, leading Socialists laid the blame for Le Pen's success on Chirac, arguing that his emphasis on crime had scared voters into opting for the extreme Right...

...This year's young demonstrators were the offspring of the '68 students...

...He uses it as a synonym of "establishment," to designate an oligarchy of statesmen, technocrats and Left Bank intellectuals who, he claims, control the key posts and rule the country as a clique—with little concern for "the small guys...

...Similarly, basic law-and-order measures, like patrolling outside schools or in commuter trains, have tended to be condemned as "reactionary...

...The accusation was soon dropped once everyone made common cause to beat Le Pen, but it was symptomatic of the Center Left's difficulties in handling such issues...

...After peering in, it finally pulled back, to a collective sigh of relief...

...Hostility to the Arab community is strong, and has heightened since September 11...

...Chirac's landslide has created widespread expectations, even though the Socialists stress that their support for him in the runoff was an endorsement solely of the Republic...

...Yet the upsurge of Republican zeal that swept across France between the two electoral rounds could be viewed as marking the final scene of a drama that began in May 1968...

...Briefly putting aside their political differences, the crowds stressed the importance of voting...

...Students sought to tear up not merely the cobblestones of Paris but the foundations of what they saw as stuffy old Gaullist France...

...But according to police sources, the antiSemitic crimes seem to have been the work of North-African youngsters who identified with stone-hurling Palestinian kids...

...Interestingly, Chevènement's 2002 presidential campaign (see Law, Order and Politics in France," NL, January/February) in many respects presented a direct democratic challenge to Le Pen...

...Another was the sympathy expressed by 90 per cent of the public for last November's protest action by gendarmes and police to spotlight the adversity they faced in trying to maintain order...

...His government is being looked to for swift action, particularly in the area of law enforcement...

...Chirac was in attendance and immediately asked the organizers of the contest to make a public apology...

...SOS-Racisme, an association that seeks to foster tolerance among France's various ethnic communities, reworked its usual motto, Touche pas à mon pote ("Don't touch my pal"), into Touche pas à ma République ("Don't touch my Republic...

...Faced with mounting petty lawlessness and evidence of organized crime linking drugs and arms smuggling with illegal immigration networks, Jospin belatedly admitted during the campaign that he may have been "naïve on insecurity...

...Almost everyone had expected that of the 16 candidates in the first round on April 21, the two qualifiers for the runoff would be neo-Gaullist incumbent Jacques Chirac and Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin...

...Throughout France, many office workers and shop attendants who were hitherto restrained now freely use racist abuse when talking of Arabs and blacks with their colleagues...

...This spring's demonstrations were a very different affair...

...The culprits could have been youths connected to the far Right, like those who set a mosque on fire between the two rounds...

...Here again, unfortunately...

...A few weeks prior to the elections, instructors in a Marseilles school were teaching eight-year-olds that any violence in the streets was largely the fault of the police...

...Elie Wiesel appealed to the French to remember the horrors of Nazism and urged Chirac, if re-elected, to ensure that high school history courses would emphasize the totalitarian atrocities of the 20th century...

...Picketers also reclaimed national values and symbols that the '68 movement had sought to replace with more universal, abstract ideals...

...Following his triumph, Chirac formed a new administration, appointing 53-yearold Jean-Pierre Raffarin as interim Prime Minister, and the country looked ahead to parliamentary elections in June...

...Indeed, a minority of second- or third-generation immigrants who are French citizens chose Le Pen, seemingly oblivious to the fact that the discriminatory measures he favored would in the long run apply to them...

...Ringing Down the Curtain on '68 France Sighs 'Ouf!' By Janice Valls-Russell Paris FRENCH GARDENERS and politicians dread May: The weather and people's moods are apt to swing abruptly from sunny mildness to budnipping frostiness...

...A lot of the kids who set cars on fire or break shop windows are black or brown," one explained, "so then people start looking at us mistrustfully, and our kids can't find jobs...

...On May 11 the anthem was booed again, this time by Corsican nationalists, before a soccer game between a Corsican and a Breton team...

...This in itself represented a break with May 1968 and the 1970s, when Trotskyite posters showed a fist smashing a ballot box...

...Phew...

...Instead, the runner-up was Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the farRight, xenophobic and anti-Semitic National Front...

...But the pronounced contrasts between the two events illustrated how the nation has changed...

...The swell grew, culminating in May Day rallies that brought an estimated 1.4 million people onto the streets around the country...

...He has announced plans to take police out of offices and put them on the streets, and to improve coordination between police and gendarmes...

...Shoppers no longer know instinctively the price of such staples as their daily loaf of bread...

...Ségolène Royal, the Minister for Family Affairs in Jospin's Cabinet, shares Del Castillo's belief that one cannot write off "all those who voted for Le Pen as fascists...

...The turnout, too, was a high 81 per cent...

...It can't go on...

...There was the same old conviction, engrained in the French perception of politics, that the country's fate is largely determined in the streets...

...As for the willingness of so many voters to cast their ballots for Le Pen despite the warnings of his fascism, that may be attributable in part to a semantic devaluation of the word over the years...

...IN 1968 the atmosphere was riotous...

...Le Pen backers who attended his May Day rally in Paris turned up wearing berets and carry ing bread loaves, reflecting the international caricature of the typical Frenchman...

...Joan of Arc was out, Trotsky in...

...Private citizens were assaulted in public and in their homes...

...The idea is to fight organized crime by creating special units that will operate on a regional level...

...In the working-class suburbs around Lille to the north, and in parts of the multiethnic south, Le Pen scored as high as 30 per cent on May 5. In certain small towns of Provence, one person in two voted for him...

...The divorce between "those at the top" and "those at the bottom," as Raffarin put it, was clear in the regions where Le Pen dominated Jospin on April 21...

...Bishops, rabbis, Protestant ministers, soccer players, magistrates, scientists, and pop singers all urged citizens to cast their ballots for Chirac...

...Pessimists predicted riots that they feared would strengthen support for Le Pen, but none occurred...

...Since May 1968, when protesters famously accused the police of being "SS men," it has become common to denounce as "fascist" all those one disagrees with...

...In a powerful column published in Le Monde on April 27, Michel Del Castillo, a Spanish-born novelist, described those who had cast their ballots for Le Pen as "drifting offspring of the proletariat, jobless adults with nowhere to go, people living on welfare and handouts, disconcerted pensioners, all left to their fate in the ditch of the globalization highway...

...Parents pushing baby carriages sang jazzed-up versions of the "Marseillaise" and waved French flags...

...The Left's hesitancy on security exemplifies what Le Pen calls the weaknesses of the "system," an epithet he has borrowed from radical liberals...

...Most would have been incapable, in his view, of defining fascism...

...Several people of Arab, Berber or African origin whom I spoke to about this voiced their exasperation with the authorities' failure to confront urban violence...

...That they are now welcomed by a significant part of the population and only halfheartedly criticized by the Left is proof of how far France has moved since 1968...

...They were also critical of Lionel Jospin, who was present but seemed unmoved...

...This year the country seemed to totter on the abyss of hoary totalitarianism...

...By rallying around Chirac, the Left implicitly conceded that although battling the far Right on the streets may be colorful, the best way to drive it back is perhaps to apply a dose of conservative medicine after two decades of Socialism...

...The accidental explosion of a petrochemical plant in Toulouse 10 days later was long suspected to be a terrorist act, and Le Pen's vote soared in the city district nearest to the site...

...was the headline in the Left-leaning daily Libération on May 6, the day after the deciding second round of the presidential election...

...A synagogue was burned down, and a bus carrying schoolchildren was stoned...

...The replacement of the franc by the euro has been a greater blow than predicted by technocrats...

...In an impromptu interview, he said he would not "tolerate any kind of attack on French institutions and symbols...

...Le Pen has put his finger on a problem others have noted but not adequately addressed: The world of French politics, journalism and culture is widely perceived as a closed shop, where jobs, information and privileges are swapped among insiders...

...Le Pen and Chevènement were both responding to widespread concern about the increasing erosion of the country's identity...

...High school and college students continued to attend classes...

...Repeaters would be taken out of their usual environment and sent not to prison but to special institutions—to help them break with the local gangs...

...Until recently, the anthem and tricolor had gradually come to seem retrograde, best left to the far Right and to official occasions...

...The Socialist government showed the same clumsiness in underestimating at least two danger signals: One was a September 2001 opinion poll in the Lille conurbation that found the traditional electoral base of the Socialist and Communist Parties swinging to the far Right...

...They called for a "generous, secular and bold" Left that would reassert "its own values" and, among other initiatives, grant homosexual couples the right to adopt children...

...Chirac ultimately garnered a staggering 82 per cent of the vote—the kind of tally associated with single-party regimes rather than parliamentary democracies...

...In the mid-1980s, when Socialist Education Minister Jean-Pierre Chevènement warned that emblematic figures like Joan of Arc should not be invoked solely by the National Front, many on the Left simply laughed...

...Calls to bar the extremist by backing Chirac spanned the political spectrum, with the notable exception of Maoistturned-Trotskyist Arlette Laguiller, who had secured a little over 5 per cent of the vote in the first round...

...Politicians of the Center Right are frequently tarred with the label by Left-wingers, who nevertheless are indignant when casual use of the term boomerangs: A professor who has been an active member of the Socialist Party for 40 years was recently accused of being a fascist by a student he failed...