Round One.(political conditions)

Late one night toward the end of March, after a day spent listening to too many Frenchmen talk politics, I called room service at my Paris hotel, hoping for a sandwich. "We have ham and Emmental, on toast," the waiter on the phone told me. "Good," I said, "and could you grill the sandwich?" "No, Madame. The menu says ham and cheese; if we grill the sandwich, that would be more like a croque-monsieur." "Agreed," I said. "Make it more like a croque-monsieur." "Alas," he said, "that is not possible. A ham-and-cheese sandwich is never grilled, only when the menu says 'croque-monsieur,' and it does not say 'croque-monsieur.' " It occurred to me then that I was lost in a very French conversation, and never mind that the waiter came from Senegal. He was French now, and our conversation was no different, really, from the ones I'd been having all day with those stock characters from the country's ongoing campaign commedia--the pundits, the philosophes, and the pols.

The French are often accused of being trapped in their Cartesian categories. A cold sandwich cannot morph into a hot sandwich without considerable mental accommodation on the part of the person putting it together. In politics, the left cannot creep toward the center, let alone the right, without a deep, if not intolerable, sense of ideological betrayal. The right rarely even considers the possibility of creeping. Change, on the right, is more a matter of cosmetic surgery. For most of the French, the "center"--call it a third way or Clinton's way or Blair's way or simply a free-market, social-democratic consensus--has been a contradiction in terms, perhaps because they remain so deeply devoted to the protective and protectionist state, l'Etat protecteur, that both the left and the right have helped create. The state has been reified, even deified; it carries the imprimatur of a historic compromise with reality.

In three weeks, France will have a new President. The first round of elections, which takes place on Sunday, is often referred to as "the protest round," because there are always so many candidates--twelve, this time--and because most of them come from tiny parties. They are against globalization, or Europe, or McDonald's; or they are for nature, or Trotsky, or Joan of Arc. And they serve a useless, if entirely democratic, purpose of letting off electoral steam and airing prejudices, and prolonging the suspense as to whom, really, the majority of the French would like to see in the Elysee. That decision is left for a second round, two weeks later, when the two candidates with the most votes face each other, exhausted from courting the people they have just eliminated. Usually, they are the old faces, making new promises. But occasionally the first Presidential round ends with an upset--which is how Valery Giscard d'Estaing, having broken with his old party, got to be President in 1974. (He ran as a modern conservative, and went on to divert a large part of the treasury into a stock of imaginary devices that were going to "sniff" offshore oil from the sky.) And it can also end in disaster, as it did in 2002, when, in a moment of collective hysteria over Muslim immigration, Jean-Marie Le Pen, from the National Front, edged out the Socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin. A suitably chastened (or frightened) country then returned its imperious Gaullist President Jacques Chirac to a second term at the Elysee, by the biggest majority in the history of five French republics.

This time, as most of the world knows by now, the Socialist candidate is the somewhat scattered, "something for everyone" president of the region in central France called Poitou-Charentes, Segolene Royal, and the conservative candidate is the tightly wired and, until last month, famously uncensored interior minister, from the rich Paris suburb of Neuilly, Nicolas Sarkozy. A month ago, Sego and Sarko, as the papers call them, were pretty much equal in the polls, but they were closely pursued by Francois Bayrou, the avowedly centrist president of Giscard's party, the Union for French Democracy, or U.D.F. The Party itself is small--only twenty-seven deputies in the National Assembly--but Bayrou had had the audacity to suggest that France might thrive in Europe, and perhaps the world, if it forgot its outworn categories of left and right and left Descartes in the seventeenth century.

Bayrou is hardly a new face--he has been a National Assembly deputy, a European deputy, and, for five years in the nineteen-nineties, an education minister--though at the time he was enjoying a short run as the candidate of youth, vigor, and the future. So were Sarkozy and Royal, who have spent their entire lives in politics. Royal embraced the image; Sarkozy, who is campaigning on experience, finally said, "Let's not exaggerate. We're all in our fifties!" But Bayrou's idea--to create a pro-Europe, pro-market, social-democratic parliamentary bloc: a party, really, that would draw its membership from progressives on the left and the right--was new, and appealing. It was even suggested that, if Bayrou made it through to the second round, enough French men and women would be so relieved at the prospect of categorical escape that they would elect him President. It didn't take long for the thought of escape to make people nervous. Where would they go? And, more to the point, would they still be "France"? Alain Duhamel, the chief political commentator at RTL, told me, "The myth is that the French love the new, but it's not true. They hate change. When it comes to change, I'd say we're somewhere back in your Wilson era." Today, the best that can be said for Bayrou's chances is that more than forty per cent of the country's voters are still wondering what to do.

France is in trouble. Everyone agrees on that. There is so much contempt for the country's old political class that the three main candidates, for all their differences, speak to the same malaise. None have been prime minister, and Bayrou is the only one to have run for President before (in 2002). Nor are they children of the establishment. They come from families demonstrably on the "outside." Royal's father was an Army lieutenant colonel. Bayrou's was a ...