Menard was slapped with a 2,000-euro fine, plus damages of 1,000 euros to be paid out to the civil society organizations that had brought him to court. Questioning the “unjust” court verdict, an angry Menard told me on Friday, “In France, it is forbidden to tell the truth. I’m just saying how things are. I’m just saying what everyone is seeing.”

These two incidents—the vote and the verdict—illustrate the country’s paradoxical relationship to the far right. While the French are voting for the far right in significant numbers, they also have institutional mechanisms in place to keep it in check. What remains to be seen is which of these two forces will win out in the battle for the leadership of France.

Nowhere is this battle being fought more stridently than in the narrow, serpentine alleyways of small towns like Béziers. Here, Le Pen won 31 percent of the vote, 10 percent higher than her national average.

For Franck Manogil, a young National Front councilor in Béziers, this was an important marker of the party’s success. “People are voting for us rather than against other parties,” he said.

Marc Giner, 61, a retired pharmaceutical executive from Béziers and generally a supporter of the Republican party, voted for the National Front in 2015 for the first time. “When you see that the right and left are doing nothing, you turn to the extremists, who have solutions,” he told me. Giner also supports Menard and believes that the media unfairly maligns the mayor and that the court verdict against him was problematic. “Menard may have spoken clumsily, but what he said was the truth. He is saying aloud what everyone is thinking in their heads.”

Menard isn’t a traditional politician, but a former journalist who co-founded Reporters Without Borders, a global organization promoting press freedom. In 2014, he ran as an independent for the post of mayor in Béziers, winning with the official support of the National Front.

In his three controversial years in office, Menard has focused on the redevelopment of the city center and on civic issues like cleanliness, but also on stoking fears related to security, immigration, and French identity. Among other things, he armed the municipal police with handguns (not the norm), attempted to throw out Syrian refugees squatting in a public housing unit (not his jurisdiction), and opposed kebab shops in the city (of which he said there were “too many”).

“What Menard does in Béziers—particularly on immigration, the French identity, and how he behaves with his opponents—shows what the obsessions of the National Front are,” said Jean-Yves Camus, co-author of Far-Right Politics in Europe. “Béziers is like a testing ground for what the policies of the National Front would be if Marine Le Pen were elected.”

Béziers’ economic distress offers one clue as to why Menard’s brand of politics has taken root. Vineyards once dominated the landscape and the local economy, until stiff competition from countries like Spain, where the labor costs were lower, made wine-making less profitable. Many vineyards closed or scaled down operations. Unemployment soared higher as the national economy faltered amid the 2008 global financial crisis. The unemployment rate in Béziers is about 16.7 percent, significantly above the national average of 10 percent. The town is among the poorest in the country.