On the evening of April 20th, nearly a quarter of France’s television-watching public was tuned in to a special called “15 Minutes pour Convaincre.” Its format was simple: each of eleven Presidential candidates would appear and speak for fifteen minutes, making a final pitch to the electorate—a full third of whom, according to analysts, remained undecided, just days before the first of two rounds of voting. The hosts asked each candidate to present an object that, if elected, he’d keep in his office at the Élysée. Jean-Luc Mélenchon (who had created his own far-left movement, La France Insoumise) chose an alarm clock, “to tell me that it’s time to redistribute the wealth.” Nathalie Arthaud (Lutte Ouvrière) brandished a photograph of Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising gloved fists at the 1968 Olympics. Marine Le Pen (representing the extreme-right Front National) came with a key, saying that she wanted to give French people their house back. Nicolas Dupont-Aignan (Debout la France) brought a wire sculpture that a handicapped child had given him, and then whipped out his cell phone and began reading a series of text messages from a “big media boss” who, he said, had tried to bully him into dropping out of the race.

It was around this time that viewers, fiddling with their own devices, began to receive notifications about some sort of shooting on the Champs-Élysées. One of the hosts interrupted the broadcast to announce that a possible terrorist attack had taken place. Then he introduced Philippe Poutou (Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste), a trade unionist who’d made an impression at the previous debate by showing up in a long-sleeved T-shirt and mercilessly dinging his better-known opponents. Without saying a word about the attack, Poutou launched into his show-and-tell session. “This is green for the richness of the soil of the Amazon forest,” he said, unfurling a miniature flag—an homage, he said, to French Guiana, where crowds had been in the streets for weeks protesting mistreatment by the mainland government.

When Emmanuel Macron (the founder of the centrist movement En Marche!) came out, he said he’d picked his childhood grammar book but had left it in the greenroom, given the gravity of the moment. “The first duty of the President is to protect,” he asserted. Later, François Fillon (the candidate of the center-right Les Républicains), declaring that he wasn’t “a fetishist,” dodged the whole exercise, and, not to be outdone by Macron, announced that he was cancelling the next day’s campaign events.

By late April, French Presidential campaigns have usually settled into a simple duel between the two main parties, the Socialists and the Republicans, but this race was a free-for-all. According to polls, four candidates—Mélenchon, Macron, Fillon, and Le Pen—all had a viable shot at progressing to the two-person runoff, to be held on May 7th. Mélenchon wanted a nationalist economy but a globalist identity, Macron wanted a globalist economy and a globalist identity, Fillon wanted a globalist economy but a nationalist identity, and Le Pen wanted a nationalist economy and a nationalist identity. The world was looking to the French election as either a ratification or a rejection of the populist surge that had led to Brexit and Trump. The balance of power among America, Europe, and Russia was also at stake. With four candidates hovering somewhere in the vicinity of twenty per cent, the permutations of possible matchups and outcomes were almost too complicated to contemplate.

This was clearly a “change election”—or, to hear it from French voters, a race in which they’d been presented with a dog’s dinner of choices, leaving them so enraged that they could hardly see straight, much less render their vote a coherent expression of their fears and aspirations. No matter how they leaned, their first words, when asked to comment on la présidentielle, were more often than not “J’en ai marre,” or “I’m fed up.” The political analyst Brice Teinturier believed that the disappointing administrations of the two previous Presidents had led to the rise of a powerful group of voters, whom he christened the PRAF Party. The acronym stood for “plus rien à faire, plus rien à foutre”—nothing more to do, nothing more to give a damn about. One day, I got to talking with the proprietor of an antique shop, who said, “You want to start another French Revolution of 1789 and cut off all their heads.”

In January, a story in Le Monde had likened the contest to something out of a Quentin Tarantino film, “one of those B-movie pastiches where each character who seems designated to be the hero finds himself ‘smoked’ by a Magnum to the head.” At that point, Fillon (a former Prime Minister) had vanquished Nicolas Sarkozy (a former President), winning the Républicains’ primary in a surprise landslide. Macron had committed a “patricide” of his former mentor, the sitting President François Hollande, by quitting as Minister of the Economy and setting up En Marche!, at the age of thirty-eight. Hollande, with an approval rating of four per cent and an unemployment rate of ten, had declined to seek reëlection, an unprecedented surrender. His Prime Minister, Manuel Valls, sought the Socialist nomination, but was unexpectedly trounced in the primary by Benoît Hamon, a former Minister of Education, whose platform included a universal basic income and a tax on robots. This was all before prosecutors put Fillon under formal investigation for misuse of public funds (according to allegations, he paid his wife and children parliamentary salaries for work they never did) and arrested several close associates of Le Pen (who ignored a summons to testify about a fake-jobs scandal of her own). Then Mélenchon, an ex-Trotskyist who wanted to tax earnings of more than four hundred thousand euros at a hundred per cent, began soaring in the polls.

“15 Minutes pour Convaincre” didn’t end until nearly eleven o’clock. In the following hours, the specifics of the attack emerged. Karim Cheurfi, a French citizen and ex-convict, had opened fire on a parked police cruiser, killing Xavier Jugelé—a proudly gay policeman who was a first responder at the Bataclan massacre—and injuring three others. Police shot Cheurfi as he tried to escape on foot. According to prosecutors, a note praising ISIS was found near his body. Jugelé was the two hundred and thirty-ninth person since the beginning of 2015 to lose his life in a terrorist attack on French soil. French people kept their composure; they didn’t need a tweet from Donald Trump (“Will have a big effect on presidential election!”) to tell them that the news had thrown the race, which commentators kept describing as “totalement inédit” (completely unheard of), into even greater chaos. Three days later, Macron and Le Pen progressed to the second round, garnering 24.01 and 21.3 per cent, respectively, of the vote.

The last time a French Presidential election was anywhere near this wild was in 2002. Jacques Chirac, the center-right President, was supposed to face Lionel Jospin, the center-left Prime Minister. (The two men had been sharing power in a “cohabitation” government.) The extreme-right candidate, Jean-Marie Le Pen—Marine’s father, an eyepatch-wearing former paratrooper and gleeful racist, who famously called the Holocaust a “detail” of history—had been polling a weak fourth. But in the first round of voting, he came in second, propelling him to a runoff against Chirac, who was embroiled in a corruption scandal. “Le choc Le Pen” galvanized both the political establishment and the public. An array of parties that had previously had no common interest banded together to repel Le Pen. More than a million citizens took to the streets, some bearing signs that read, “Vote for the Crook, Not the Fascist.” Ultimately, Chirac received more than eighty-two per cent of the vote, the most decisive victory in French history.