FRENCH FOLLIES.(presidential elections in France)

Last Monday, on the afternoon following the first round of the French Presidential election, the Paris daily Le Monde ran a cartoon of the National Front candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen piloting a small airplane toward two towers that were identified as the current President, Jacques Chirac, and the current Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin. That image may strike New Yorkers as excessive, but it shows how it must have felt if you were there. What has happened in France is both less significant and more frightening than a lot of people like to think. It is less significant because Le Pen's "victory," his finishing second, ahead of Jospin--with seventeen per cent of the vote, in a field of more than a dozen candidates--and taking his place, with Chirac, as one of the two candidates on the ballot in the second round, is largely a freak result of a Presidential voting system worse even than our own. If George Bush and Al Gore and Ralph Nader and Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot and Jesse Jackson and John McCain and Pat Robertson and your uncle Mo all ran on a single ballot on a single day, with the top two finishers advancing to a runoff, weird things would happen here, too. Weird things do happen here. Witness Perot in early '92 and Buchanan in early '96, when they were beneficiaries of the same factors that put Le Pen in second place last week: a mixture of what-the-hellism and genuine discontent. The constitution of the Fifth Republic was hand-tailored, in 1958, for one man, Charles de Gaulle, who wanted a Presidential election with a cutthroat charisma contest, in which the winner assumed absolute monarchical powers, and politics was dislodged from petty party loyalties. Ever since de Gaulle went away, French Presidents have been wearing the same constitutional suit, and ever more uneasily. Sooner or later, it was bound to fall around the ankles of the system.

Still, there is no far-right Vichyite renaissance in France, no Pieds Noirs uprising, nor, really, is there any antiSemitic rampage. (Le Pen is spasmodically anti-Semitic but systematically anti-immigrant; i.e., anti-Arab.) The problem is not that the cancer has grown; Le Pen's vote is about the same size as it was last time, but a lower turnout made it bulk larger. The problem is that the disease has not receded. The situation is scarier than anyone wants to say, simply because if, by some hideous mischance, or some strange perversity of purpose--and perversities of purpose are not unknown in France--Le Pen were to be elected President in the second round of voting, next week, France would undergo a revolution of one kind or another, and the Fifth Republic would come to an end. Left and right alike, the technocratic and meritocratic elite that actually governs France (and whose existence is at once a key cause of the protest vote and an enduring source of the country's pride) would not permit a National Front government. What it would do is hard to say--France has a long ...