Macron, in turn, has been raking up the ghosts of the National Front's contentious past. He made a high-profile visit to France's biggest Holocaust memorial, which seemed to be aimed at drawing attention to two recent National Front scandals.

Last month, Le Pen was widely criticized for claiming that France wasn't responsible for the deportation of thousands of Jews to concentration camps in 1942. And Jean-François Jalkh, who recently took over from Le Pen as the party's head, stepped down just two days after his appointment when an interview he did in 2000 questioning whether the poisonous gas Zyklon B was used against Jews in the camps resurfaced. Le Pen's father, Jean-Marie, who previously led the National Front but was kicked out by his daughter, gained international notoriety for calling the Nazi gas chambers simply a “detail of the history of World War II.” Marine Le Pen's niece and National Front rising star Marion Maréchal-Le Pen accused Macron on Sunday of “World War II blackmail.”

Then, on Monday, Macron stood just a few hundred yards from the National Front's annual May Day march, on the banks of the Seine in Paris, and memorialized a Moroccan man who was drowned by skinheads who'd attended the 1995 iteration of the rally. It was a gesture that seemed designed to dismiss Le Pen's attempts to detoxify the National Front's image, portraying the party as aligned with racists and extremists.

This year's May Day march was led by Jean-Marie Le Pen, as was the one in 1995. He told supporters that “Emmanuel Macron is doing a tour of graveyards. It's a bad sign for him.”

Macron was joined at the riverbank by Said Bouarram, the son of the man who was thrown into the Seine 22 years ago and left to drown. Bouarram, who supports Macron in the runoff election, says his father was targeted “because he was a foreigner, an Arab. That is why I am fighting, to say no to racism.”

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One of the perpetrators was sentenced to eight years in prison in 1998, while three others received five-year terms.

Many French are of Arab extraction, especially in the suburbs, and hail from former French colonies such as Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia. Discrimination against them and other minorities is rife, both by employers and police, and voting rates in the suburbs are below the national average.

That legacy of colonialism has proved to be yet another flash point between the two candidates. After Macron called France's bloodstained colonial administration of Algeria a “crime against humanity” on Monday, Le Pen shot back that he had maligned France's “glorious history.”