ORANGE ALERT.(rising popularity of National Front party in Europe)

In 1996, shortly after the National Front unexpectedly won control of the historic Provencal town of Orange, in the South of France, the newly elected mayor, Jacques Bompard, declared that the town would become a laboratory for far-right ideas. Exactly how the anti-immigration, anti-government ideas of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the National Front leader, would be enacted on the local level of a town was not clear. Bompard, a former dentist and the founder of the National Front in Vaucluse, is a populist with an abrasive style. In council meetings, in the elegant mairie, or town hall, he has been known to announce loudly when an opposition member rises to speak that he is going for a piss. His unconventional manners have not dented his popularity, though, or prevented him from rendering acceptable here a party that makes most French citizens shudder. Le Pen was not elected President. But in 2001 the Mayor of Orange was reelected, with an overwhelming sixty per cent of the vote. In this apparently peaceful town, National Front government is now an entrenched reality.

Orange, with a population of twenty-nine thousand, sits on a low plateau east of the Rhone River. There has been human settlement here since prehistoric times. On the slopes outside the town grow the vines that produce Cotes du Rhone. The Romans, who occupied Orange two thousand years ago, also appreciated its vineyards and, in return, left an important physical legacy--a commemorative arch and a magnificent open-air theatre that seats nine thousand. In summer, it hosts a short opera season, which ranks as the fifth most popular festival in the country. To the visitor's eye, Orange is a town comfortable with its rituals and traditions.

I arrived in Orange at the end of April, between the first and second rounds of the Presidential elections. In the first round, the campaign was paralyzingly dull: the two main candidates, the Socialist Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin, and the conservative President, Jacques Chirac, had been power-sharing for five years, and voters were weary of the ill-defined political debate that resulted. Jospin is a buttoned-up Protestant, honest but almost wholly devoid of charisma. Chirac has personality and guile, but his honesty had been seriously questioned by allegations of bribery. Voters were bored, the turnout was low, Jospin was eliminated, and, to the mortification of the French elite, the second round of the Presidential contest was now between Jacques Chirac (who polled the lowest number of votes of any incumbent President in French history) and Jean-Marie Le Pen.

As I watched the nightly television news, it seemed that the streets of France had been given over to protests against what was widely perceived as a catastrophe. But in Orange, where Le Pen had won nearly twice as many votes as Chirac, there was almost no trace of crisis. In fact, there was almost no trace of the election--no posters, no leaflets, no banners across the streets. The only concession I noticed was that an annual military parade held by the Foreign Legion, which normally passes through town, had been reduced to a ceremony at the barracks; a public military display, I'd heard, was felt to be too inflammatory in the aftermath of Le Pen's success. Attendance was by invitation only, but the Legion was happy to issue me one.

At the entrance to the barracks, an officer whose chest clanked with oversized medals waved me through. I found a seat in the bleachers, among a small audience of veterans and legionnaires' relatives, all smartly dressed for the occasion. On the parade ground, the 1st Battalion was drawn up, white kepis and red epaulets bright in the morning sun. The French Foreign Legion has always been a refuge for men with a past to escape, and it is still possible to lose a difficult identity by joining up with few questions asked. But it's not exactly a soft option--recruits are not allowed out of the country for the first five years. The presumption is that whatever they are trying to escape must be far worse. These days, most of them, I was told, are from Eastern Europe.

When Orange first went National Front, some analysts sought comfort in a military explanation. What would you expect, they said, of a town that was full of right-leaning Army types? Orange has always been a garrison town and a place where veterans come to settle--ever since the soldiers of the Roman legion colonized the ...