Which might explain why a third candidate suddenly became such a serious contender.

Until eight weeks ago, François Bayrou, a centrist former minister of education, was a marginal figure, down there in the polls with the Marxists and the “save the organic truffle” brigade. Since then, he has leapt to join the leaders. He has stalled in third place, but one poll this week predicted that if Mr. Bayrou and Mr. Sarkozy face off in the clinching second round of the election, in May, Mr. Bayrou would win.

The question is, pourquoi?

Well, Mr. Bayrou is the anti-excitement candidate, a sort of political Prozac after all the amphetamines of the Sarkozy-Royal conflict. He is fairly young at 55, and he has a relatively full head of hair, but so far he has left the paparazzi in a soporific daze. He wants to unite everyone — he’s a member of a centrist party but might well appoint a Socialist prime minister; he is a Catholic but a staunch defender of secularism in schools. The message is that if he can unite God and the atheists, surely he can unite France.

Most of all, he is something that even urban voters see as quintessentially French — a farmer. His official Web site shows him pitchforking hay on the family farm, and he was recently quoted in the weekly Le Point as saying: “My friends and I aren’t the jet set. We’re the tractor set.”

One should not underestimate the strength of this rustic image in the national psyche. If you gave an average Frenchman the choice between a reforming president who would plug the country’s huge deficit and a good cheese, he would probably opt for the cheese.

This is why in France, candidates not only kiss babies, they kiss cows. Politicians flocked into the recent Agriculture Fair in Paris to be photographed embracing livestock. And no one looked more convincing in the clinch with a four-legged, hairy friend than Mr. Bayrou.

His rise in the polls seems to prove that, despite what they say, the French are upset by upheaval, revolted by revolt. They want things to stay the way they have always been. Even Louis XVI was able to provoke his subjects into guillotining him only because he tried to flee the country, thus making himself look a traitor. If he had stayed in Paris and hugged a few prize bulls, France would probably still be a monarchy.