Yet this seems to offer scant comfort. Instead the French are focused on their country’s failures: its dispatch under Vichy of Jews to their deaths, its painful colonial past in Algeria, its faltering attempts to integrate one of Europe’s largest Muslim communities, its vulnerability to terrorist attacks in Paris and Nice, its expensive and sometimes rigid welfare state, its ambiguous relationship to global capitalism, its fraying model of “laïcité” (or secularism) designed to subsume religious difference in the values of the French republic — all are endlessly agonized over.

Image Supporters of the presidential candidate François Fillon in Porte de Versailles conference center in Paris on April 9. Credit... Pierre Terdjman for The New York Times

“There is a certain French masochism,” Pascal Bruckner, an author, told me. “We are a country that does not unleash its potential. We ruminate on the past. After 1989, we thought Europe would become French. But the models of Germany and Thatcher did much better. And so we lapse into mediocrity.” Jacques Rupnik, a political scientist, put it this way: “France suffers from cultural and civilizational insecurity. Many people feel somehow dispossessed.”

This sense of dispossession, of loss, is what the National Front has exploited: loss of identity, jobs, national borders; loss of faith in a corrupt political system. “On est chez nous!” — roughly “We are at home!” — is the party’s strange battle cry, chanted at every rally. But why such pathological need to reaffirm belonging, and who exactly are “we”? Millions of immigrants from North and sub-Saharan Africa, many of them Muslims, do not appear to make the cut.

“There is no right or left. This election is about patriotism versus globalization,” Nicolas Bay, the secretary-general of the National Front, told me. “That is why we would end immigration. If it’s Le Pen against the globalist Macron in the second round, it will be clear what the contest is about: Do we defend the nation, or is the nation finished?”

Macron is a former banker and economy minister under Hollande. Small, with glittering blue eyes, his pitch is that he’s a tech-friendly pragmatist with the ability to revitalize France. Nobody quite knows what’s in his gut. To fans he’s a doer; to critics he’s a hedger of bets. But nobody can deny his remarkable surge. En Marche! (Onward!), Macron’s movement, was formed just a year ago. It has become the last best hope of those who would stop Le Pen.

In an interview, Macron told me: “Look, do you want to strengthen Europe, to have a strong reformed France, or do you just want to leave this world and return to the 19th century? What Le Pen proposes does not fly even for a second.”

I headed east to Metz, in the Lorraine region of France. Outside the station, opened in 1908 when the city was part of Germany, I found French, German and European Union flags fluttering to mark “Metz Wunderbar” (“Wonderful Metz”) week, a celebration of French-German friendship. Such is Europe today: a shared house built over borders etched in blood. Lorraine closed its last iron ore mine a couple of decades ago. The region has struggled to replace it with service sector jobs. The National Front has prospered.