At first sight, there is not much new here: after a decade or so of street violence, from the demonstrations of the Gilet Jaunes to the recent protests against pension reform, taking in the 2023 riots against the police killing of young North African in a Paris suburb along the way, the French public is now accustomed to scenes that in any other country would look like freeze-frame snapshots from a war zone.

It is, however, the vicious quality of the violence from young people which has been genuinely shocking. Notably, in Paris, a lone young trainee female police officer was pursued, tripped and then battered on the ground by a gang of youths. In Belfort, a city in northeastern France, a plain-clothes officer was almost killed by a “lynch mob” — so-called by the press — of hooded teenagers who pinned him to the ground and repeatedly kicked his head. And in Marseille, a young woman at a bus stop was sprayed in the face by an improvised flamethrower wielded by a laughing kid.

Equally terrifying is the eerie, almost incomprehensible way that the violence, which has erupted outside schools all over France, from Lille to Marseille, came apparently out of nowhere. So far, over 1,000 secondary schools have “mobilized”, which means student strikes, barricades and fires in school buildings. The damage will cost millions of euros to repair. Over 3,000 arrests have been made, mainly of young people.

The unrest began at the end of September, taking the form of a series of reasonable protests in the Paris region by school pupils. They decried the degraded state of the French educational system, making legitimate complaints about poor timetabling, lack of teachers, and rotten buildings in a state of Soviet-style shabbiness: freezing in winter and unbearably hot in summer heatwaves. It is not only the students but also the teachers who have been complaining about these conditions. My friend Laurence has taught science in a variety of Parisian schools over the past 10 years and testifies that she has never seen conditions so bad or students so angry. “It is as if the government actively despises us,” she said.

Student anger has also focused on the “Parcoursup”, an online system that, in 2018, replaced the old university application system. Parcoursup offers students the ability to apply to many more universities than previously, and allows universities to rank applications via perceived merit rather than allocating them by lottery, as its predecessor did. But the basis of the rankings is opaque, with the Left arguing that it privileges better-off students, that France is not a true meritocracy, and that this is an assault on the core concept of “égalité”.

This has been one of the rallying cries of the radical Left party La France Insoumise (LFI), led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon. The party is the closest challenger to the Rassemblement National (RN), led by Marine Le Pen, who is currently leading the polls for the presidential elections next year. The LFI has been courting school-age students and teachers for years, with their strategies for further investment and a reshaping of university policies, controversially opening up elite colleges to educationally disadvantaged students. But this is the first time that the Macron government has explicitly pointed to the LFI’s role in deliberately stirring up subversion. This at least was the view of the Prime Minister, Sébastien Lecornu, who, while calling a crisis Cabinet meeting last Friday, pointed the finger directly at Mélenchon, stating that “the LFI and its ultra-Left proxies are at the origins of this movement”.

His accusation has been given substance by the sight of the LFI Mayor of Saint-Denis, Bally Bagayoko, jubilant and dancing in front of the burning shell of the Lycée Paul Eluard. There have also been calls by the LFI activist Ritchy Thibault “to march on the Elysée Palace and burn it down”. Intelligence agencies for the police have also spent much time tracking preparations for the disorder on social media since early September, noting among the calls for “armed action”, the language of the far-Left — notably “the end of neo-Liberal democracy”, “disrupting the social order”, “challenging state violence”.

Mélenchon has been, as ever, mercurial, playing both sides at once. He has called for a “march of peace” today, with students, teachers and parents, united in wearing white hats or caps, coming together to show their disgust with the government. At the same time, LFI rhetoric argues that in all its forms, from bad schooling to police brutality, “state violence is not legitimate”. The students have a right, says Mélenchon, even a duty, “to take revenge”. He has publicly denounced both Lecornu and Valérie Pécresse, the centrist President of the Île-de-France region who wanted to charge Bagayoko’s administration €100,000 for the damage caused, as “racist”, leveling the same charge at the news channel BFMTV, which has shown some of the most graphic images. The present democratic structure of France, says Mélenchon, is loaded with “white privilege” and part of “an already obsolete present”. He calls for a “citizen’s revolution”, driven by “the force of numbers”, and led by the new postcolonial generations to come. (France already has 7.6 million second-generation immigrants aged 30 or less.)

Unsurprisingly, the student protests are now conflated with Gaza, Palestinian flags are everywhere, and there are calls for a “Sixth Republic” — effectively rewriting the present constitution — and “a New France”. Mélenchon’s overall aim is a revolutionary one: to create a France for the 21st century, one that is constructed out of its new second and third generation of immigrants. The aim is not assimilation into an old order, but destroying it altogether.

All of this has the potential to backfire on Mélenchon. Two years ago, the Minister for Justice, Gérald Darmanin, identified the overall LFI strategy as “bordelisation” — a word that is hard to translate but roughly means in slang terms “deliberately creating chaos”. More recently, Bruno Retailleau, former Minister of the Interior and a presidential candidate for 2027, described the LFI as “an absolutely seditious party with a fascination for violence” and called for a debate on banning the LFI. Mélenchon’s slyly sarcastic response to Retailleau was that this was “absurd” and that not a single LFI document could be traced to recent disturbances, unless he had incited them “by telepathy”.

Mélenchon is smart, but he also underestimates the extent to which conservatism, in a political or simply a social sense, is still a force to be reckoned with in the “Old France” — which still makes up the majority of French people. With his strategy of organized disruption, Mélenchon is clearly playing once again into the hands of Le Pen, whose agenda is the opposite of Mélenchon’s. A recent poll in the newspaper Le Figaro found that 78% of French people thought that the LFI was “aggressive”, and 70% thought they were actively “dangerous”.

The precedent for all this violence and rebellion is of course the near-revolution of 1968, still a nostalgic meme for Old Leftists. Students and school kids who were in revolt angered the older generations so much that they effectively delivered Right-wing governments until 1982.

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But the 21st century is a totally different political landscape in France, shaped by tensions over race, religion and ethnic identity as much or more than the neo-Marxist dreams of revolution cherished by the LFI. This is why Le Pen also has a substantial youth vote to match or even overtake the LFI, a youth which craves order and discipline over anarchy. I have been to enough RN rallies over the years to see how Jordan Bardella, Le Pen’s young and handsome protegé and president of the RN, is greeted with pop-star style adulation when he speaks to an often hip and well-informed young audience. We are a long way from the fascist brutes of the old days of the Front National, the predecessor of today’s RN.

Le Pen has now come out on national television, accusing Mélenchon of stirring up trouble in the schools. Her prescription, sidestepping the issue of immigrants, is for new, stricter laws to punish so-called “casseurs” — the most destructive of the rioters.

None of this stops Mélenchon from invoking the specter of “fascism” when he talks about his opponents, and especially Le Pen and the RN. The more he does this, however, the more even centrists and those on the Right, normally opposed to Le Pen, see the sense in her analysis of the situation. Put simply, the harder Mélenchon drives the strategy of chaos, the more deeply retrenched even the milder conservatives become, scared of the forces yet to be unleashed and what their country might look like if Mélenchon ever comes to power.

It would be a savage irony if the LFI, the party of insurrectionary challenges to the “bourgeois order”, also turned out to be the party that opened the way for an RN presidency.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Well, not quite.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The soap opera continues…

The unconventional, anti-elite mass movement which sprang up last October in peripheral or ‘drive through’ France has ceased to exist in its original form. It no longer represents a danger to the French establishment. It no longer has the support of the provincial masses.

The weekly demonstrations persist, or dribble on, reaching Act XXX, or a 30^th consecutive Saturday of protest, last weekend. Nationwide turn-out has fallen to 10,000 or less, according to government figures, compared to the 280,000 people who took part in Act I, the first “weekend putsch” on 17 November.

Seven months after it began, the movement is maintained on life support by a hard core of provincial obsessives and ideological mercenaries from the urban Left, some peaceful, others extremely violent.

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What remains of the rebellion is still locally disruptive, such as last weekend in Montpellier where 200 to 300 yellow vests and their anti-fa and anarcho-Left Black Bloc allies fought with police. Tempers were stoked up by a false rumour, spread by word of mouth and by social media, that two protesters, including an elderly woman, had been killed by police plastic bullets.

It is clear, however, that the original, broad-based, ill-defined, leaderless, small town and outer suburban gilets jaunes movement has collapsed – partly because it insisted on being leaderless and ill-defined.

The root causes of the rebellion remain. The fracture between a thriving, metropolitan France and a left-behind suburban and rural France persists. A widespread sense of dislocation from, or disgust with, political-as-usual endures. President Emmanuel Macron’s popularity percentage has recovered slightly but not beyond 40% (by the most generous estimate).

Arguably, the yellow vest movement has been a success: President Macron has made substantial concessions, including €17bn in tax cuts for the less well off, higher pensions and abandoned carbon taxes on petrol and diesel.

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But this wasn’t enough. The gilets jaunes saw themselves as a revolution, not a social protest. They believed that they could bring down representative democracy, not just petrol-pump prices. In truth they never had the numbers to overturn Macron, let alone the French state.

“For me, it’s over. We tried but we failed,” said José, a gilets jaunes activist in Normandy whom I first interviewed in November. “Our idea was to do things differently, to be non-political, non-ideological and let people control their own lives and their own taxes, with as much grass-roots decision making as possible. But politics and personalities got in the way.”

I should add that, according to other local yellow vests, José was one of the personalities who “got in the way”.

The profile of those taking part began to change three months ago, as I reported in UnHerd. The early protesters were a mixture of Right, Left and apolitical, working and lower-middle class, small businessmen and workers, young, middle-aged and the old, the rational and the conspiracy-obsessed. From March, the demographics of the Saturday protests became younger, more metropolitan and more overtly left-wing.

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There are other signs of the implosion of the gilets jaunes. In November and December four out of ten cars in provincial France displayed the fluorescent hi-vis waist-coasts that symbolise the movement. In recent journeys across Normandy and Brittany I counted one in 100 yellow-badged cars, at most.

In the European elections last month, two gilets jaunes lists of candidates attracted 0.5% and 0.05% of the vote. Many of their number opposed the lists as a “sell out” to electoral politics. Nonetheless, the voting figures mocked gilets jaunes claims to represent “the people”.

Other parties which supported them – Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s hard-Left La France Insoumise and various small anti-EU parties – received an electoral drubbing. Even Marine Le Pen’s 23.3%, just ahead of Macron’s party list on 22.4%, was a relatively poor performance after seven months of anti-government protests.

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All the same, the election results provided a telling scan of the fracture between metropolitan and non-metropolitan France. In Paris and the 20 or so other thriving French cities, Macron’s “Renaissance” list topped the poll, whereas in middling and small towns, the far right scored around 26% and Macron’s list polled 21%.

Christophe Boutin, a politics professor at Caen University who has studied the movement, says that support has been eroded by Macron’s concessions; by violence on both sides; by the drift towards leftism; by boredom; by family pressure; and by shortage of money to attend protests.

Fundamentally, though, he says, the movement has been unable to provide a convincing explanation of how it could achieve its goals: the resignation of Macron; the clearing out of all career politicians; the creation of a system of direct democracy by decision-making on the internet.

Overwhelming electoral support or great violence would have been needed to achieve such aims. The movement commanded neither but never faced up to this fact.

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Many of the original peaceful gilets jaunes were driven out of the movement by the rise of low-level terrorism. There was a point last December when the gilets jaunes movement seemed to be teetering towards insurrection, even civil war. The violent protests in Paris on 1 December and 8 December were led mostly by an extremist fringe of provincial gilets jaunes. The piggy-back activities of the black bloc guerrillas came later.

There was also much yellow vest violence away from the Saturday protests – attacks on politicians’ homes and political headquarters, attacks on newspaper kiosks, the burning of a restaurant, arson at motorway toll booths, and the smashing of thousands of radar speed traps (leading to a sharp increase in road deaths early this year).

Some, no doubt, were discouraged from attending the Saturday protests by the fear of “police violence”. But I was in the middle of the crowds in Paris on three of the worst days of violence and on each occasion the violence was started by the protesters. If anything, on those days, the police were too passive and lost control.

There have been cases of police over-reaction and brutality. According to government figures, 2,448 protesters and 1,797 police have been injured since the rebellion began. More than a score of demonstrators have lost eyes or hands.

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But to speak of systematic repression, after 30 weeks of protest, is absurd. In my experience, no peaceful yellow vest march or demo has ever been suppressed.

Foreign commentators like to project their own obsessions onto the gilets jaunes. Some see them as a nationalist-populist rebellion against a liberal elite, comparable to the Brexit movement in the UK or the Maga and pro-Trump movement in the United States.

American Trump supporters and British Brexit supporters would have been startled to see large groups of Yellow Vests, even in the early days, marching along chanting the hard-left anthem “anti, anti-capitalisme. Ah, ooh.”

People on the Left in other countries, including Britain, like to see the gilets jaunes as a popular left-wing protest against the heartless liberalism of Macron. The movement always had its left-wing tendencies and has now become overtly leftist in approach. But non-French leftists would have found, especially in the early days, many gilets jaunes who were virulently anti-Left, anti-semitic, racist or misogynist.

Here is the great difference with Britain or the United States. The gilets jaunes surfed on many similar sources of anger but they had no Trump or Farage to focus attention on core issues, like migration or Brexit.

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Their most important mistakes – a refusal to accept leaders and spell out clear and answerable demands – are central to the ethos of the movement. Arguably, the yellow vests were defeated by themselves, not by Macron and certainly not by alleged police or state violence as some sympathisers, allege.

What now?

The movement will stutter on for a while. Some speak of a summer truce – this is France after all – and a new revolution in the autumn. Some speak darkly of a lurch towards “direct action” or violence. Other gilets jaunes spokespeople are focused on the local and municipal elections next year as a platform – finally – to allow the movement to enter and influence mainstream politics.

Something like the gilets jaunes may eventually be resurrected. They will probably take a different, less threatening, more traditional and possibly more effective form. Any attempt to impose realistic goals or choose leaders will inevitably be portrayed by the historic wing of the yellow jackets a “betrayal”.

The original ill-defined and undefinable, anti-ideological, anti-political citizens’ movement is not yet buried. But it is certifiably defunct.

To read more of John Lichfield’s reporting on the gilets jaunes, click here

Her imitator and friend, Matteo Salvini, has taken his once marginal far-Right party, La Lega, to a share of power and increasing popularity in Italy. The populists are in government in Hungary, Poland, and Austria. Her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, is increasingly infirm and no longer embarrasses her with his thoughts on the Holocaust or the “correct behaviour” of German troops in France during World War Two.

This is surely her moment.

And yet she has had a disastrous time in the 20 months since she was crushed by Emmanuel Macron in the second round of the presidential elections. She has failed to establish herself as the de facto ‘leader of the opposition’. If anything, that role has been seized by her populist rival on the hard Left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

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She is, according to one of her most senior economic advisors, who recently quit the party, economically illiterate and incapable of understanding even the most basic fiscal questions.

Euro or no Euro? Low-taxation or big-state interventionism? It was these same confusions that Macron gleefully tore apart during Marine’s calamitous performance in a television debate just before the second round vote last year. Since when, little has changed, save the name of the party – and her popularity.

Marine’s poll rating as ‘potential future President’ has fallen to around 16% . Her party remains more resilient than its leader electorally, but financially it is in a mess. The Rassemblement National, formerly the Front National, is struggling to keep afloat after being denied €2 million of government election funds, for defrauding the European Parliament.

It also faces an embarrassing trial of two of its former campaign finance officials. They are accused of defrauding both the French state and the party’s own grassroots candidates, with Marine Le Pen’s blessing. They, and she, deny all wrong-doing.

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Florian Philippot, her estranged former number two and the man who masterminded the de-toxification of the FN, has painted a chaotic picture of the party in his book Frexit, published last month, Few party officials are capable of writing a speech or preparing a candidate for a TV interview, he claims. Those who are capable rarely bother. The Front National under Marine, he wrote, became a “universe of laziness”.

His old boss, he concluded, knew after her defeat in May 2017 that she had failed and would continue to fail. She knew that she would never be elected to high office.

And yet Marine Le Pen shows no sign of giving up. The RN/FN is a family business as well as a political party. Some disgruntled ex-Frontistes say that it is a family business before it is a political party. No serious challenger has emerged, or probably can emerge, to the hegemony of the Le Pens over the ex-FN.

Marine’s niece, Marion Maréchal, only 28, but “retired” from politics, may eventually become a new kind of leader for the party, but not for many years and certainly not before the next presidential election in 2022. This family “ownership” structure is one of the principlal factors preventing the RN, name change or not, from emerging seriously as a potential party of government.

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Philippot, defenestrated by more traditional-minded LePennists in March, has now launched a rival party, Les Patriotes, which pursues his Nigel Farage-like conviction that “sovereignty” and confrontation with the European Union are the proper route to power for nationalists – not the FN/RN’s traditional fixation with racial and cultural “identity” and immigration.

He is almost certainly wrong about that. There is a latent, grumbling euro-scepticism in France but no widespread desire to challenge the country’s membership of  the single market, the Euro or the Brussels institutions.

Without Philippot’s influence, the Rassemblement National has moved back closer to the identity politics of Le Pen père – though without Jean Marie’s vulgarity, his anti-Semitism or his obsession with the Second World War. Marine Le Pen has returned to the themes of allegedly uncontrolled immigration and the internal threat from militant Islam. Unlike her father, she tries to put these issues into a “Republican” rather than “racial” context. Like Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, she portrays Islam as a threat to western traditions of tolerance and democracy.

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She has however failed to clarify her economic policies. French membership of the EU and the Euro are still in theory up for debate, but scarcely mentioned. It would be difficult to see how the RN could run on such a programme in next May’s European elections – if it were not for the fact that voters care little about European election manifestos. The same will not be true in the next presidential campaign in 2022.

To understand the schizophrenic nature of the FN/RN, to understand why it has been tearing itself apart since Marine became president in 2011, you have to consider geography as well as ideology. The old FN had many tribes – ex-Vichy sentimentalists, expatriate Algerian white settlers (pied noirs), Catholic fundamentalists, pagan believers in white supremacy and former members, like Jean-Marie Le Pen himself, of Pierre Poujade’s anti-elite, anti-tax and anti-regulation party of the mid-1950s.

Somehow, give or take the odd split or revolt, Jean-Marie kept this collection of mutually distrustful clans together. He was helped by the fact that the FN of the 1980s and 1990s was mostly implanted in the South, in Alsace and the hard-scrabble, lower-middle-class suburbs of big cities. Marine, encouraged by Philippot, conquered new territories in the post-industrial North and East, recruiting many blue-collar voters who once supported the Communists or Socialists. She has also built a big following in rural France, especially among older people and the unemployed young.

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In the first round of last year’s election, Marine racked up votes of between 30 and 70% in villages in Normandy or on the remote eastern steppes of France, which know no crime or immigration but feel ignored and disfranchised by the multi-racial, global-minded, Europhile, broadly successful France of the cities and big towns.

To appeal to these new electorates, Marine and Philippot bolted on to the old Frontiste, anti-Socialist, small-government doctrine a statist devotion to early retirement, high pensions, industrial intervention and agricultural protectionism. No attempt was made to rationalise the conflicting programmes or explain how they would be funded.

Thus the Marine Le Pen FN/RN became two parties – a nationalist-socialist party in the North and East and a Poujadiste-fundamentalist Christian and white “identity” party in the South. Philippot’s ejection has brought the party back closer to its Southern, Poujadiste, pied-noir roots – but not entirely. Marine Le Pen’s parliamentary constituency, Hénin-Beaumont, is near Lille in the ex-industral North. She is unwilling to surrender her fiefdom or her ex-Leftist voters to Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise. Result: confusion and continuing tension and suspicion between the “northern” and “southern” wings of the party.

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In any case, economic political coherence and abstract political theory are not Marine’s strengths. Her father Jean-Marie Le Pen is doubtless a sincere racist – not a fascist but a pre-fascist, someone who drew his political beliefs from an ancient French strand of anti-semitism and a mystical belief in “patrie”, “race”, “blood” and “soil”. Marine Le Pen gives the impression – both in public and in interviews and private conversations – of being a rather pleasant saleswoman and TV host. It is difficult to dislike her. It is also difficult finally to take her seriously.

She is a good public speaker. She usually performs well on TV. She has had some success in her campaign to “de-demonise” the FN/RN.  Her defeat last year should not disguise the fact that she managed to persuade over 30 per cent of French voters to cast a ballot for a hard-right candidate – far more than her father ever achieved.

But she is also responsible for two big failures. The first is the incoherence of her economic programme, which Macron joyfully exploded live on TV. The second, more surprisingly to non-French readers perhaps, is her failure to turn the FN/RN into a genuine grass-roots party.

In travelling all over France covering politics over the last 20 years, I have repeatedly stumbled across this paradox. The ex-FN is a populist party and, in some areas, a popular party. But it has great difficulty in recruiting local candidates or even local, political operatives. Its candidates are often people from head office. In one campaign that I visited in Lorraine, the party’s standard-bearer was Le Pen senior’s chauffeur, who rarely visited the constituency. For a party which claims to represent “the people” against “the elite”, this is embarrassing.

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Those candidates that are recruited locally often turn out to be more extreme on racial questions than the detoxified Mariniste version of the FN officially allows. Just as awkward is the fact that they don’t stay in office for long: of the 54 Front National regional councillors elected in 2015, only 42 remain. The rest have resigned over petty quarrels or switched parties.

Marine Le Pen will not go away easily or soon. She is stubborn and, in any case, the family business is the family business.

Some things are going her way. Macron is less popular than the unpopular François Hollande was at the same stage of his presidency. The new leader of the main centre-right party, Les Républicains, Laurent Wauquiez has set out to steal the ex-FN’s clothes and voters. He has failed. His poll ratings are disastrous. Her clever niece Marion, who was emerging strongly as rival to her aunt, has given up politics, for the time being at least.

The RN will probably perform well in the European elections in May. The low turn-out always favours parties outside the mainstream.  But this is unlikely to be the “game-changer” that Marine Le Pen pretends. She will have to do very well indeed to match her stunning performance in the last European elections, when she took 25 per cent of the French seats. The fact that she is not leading the RN list herself will be a handicap. She has chosen to keep her seat in the National Assembly rather than try again for a seat in Strasbourg. Under a new French law, she cannot have both. The RN European campaign will probably be led by her romantic partner, Louis Aliot, the party’s vice President. He is a poor campaigner and a poor public speaker but in the RN/FN family comes first.

Marine Le Pen, barring an unforeseeable development, will be the RN presidential candidate in four years’ time. She will, once again, be one of the top three or four candidates jostling to reach the two candidate second round. Her best chance of ultimate victory – would be a Mélenchon v Le Pen run off in May 2022. This is highly unlikely since the hard left and hard right electorates overlap, especially in post-industrial and rural France.

In any case, the French two round system permits insurgent candidates in the first round but stacks the odds against them in the second. Unless you are an insurgent of the centre like Emmanuel Macron, the rest of the electorate tends to combine against you.

Macron’s absurdly charmed life has come to an abrupt halt this year. All the same, he remains lucky in his likely principal opponents in 2022. Florian Philippot may be sour and parti pris but he is probably right. Marine Le Pen’s moment has come and gone.

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