At the edge of Seine-Saint-Denis, I am sitting in the functional, plastic-grey office of Jérôme Fourquet. This slight, dark-haired man is one of France’s most famous pollsters. Given that the state forbids ethno-religious statistics, he laughs that his work is skirting the edge of the law.

“Statistics show,” he says, “perceptions of anti-Semitic insecurity exploded in France in the early 2000s. This reconfigured where French Jews live.” They are not moving far. Half of France’s roughly 500,000 Jews live in the Paris conurbation. This aliyah is from one banlieue to another. “We found that the number of Jews in districts of Seine-Saint-Denis has plummeted in ten to 15 years.”

Fourquet’s research shows that French Jews are moving from areas run by Communist mayors — twinned with Palestinian camps, where Palestinian war heroes hold honorary citizenship, and regular exhibitions are held on the Nakba — to areas where there are right-wing mayors, and twinned with Israel. Internal aliyah — not to Israel, or English-speaking countries — is the largest movement of French Jews. “Are they trying to flee Muslim areas?” I ask. “Yes, clearly, very clearly,” says Fourquet. “What we found was that when the Jews moved, this was the canary in the coal mine. There is now massive flight of the non-immigrant population from these areas.Things that were previously felt by the Jewish community are now felt by the population at large.”

What do regular French families fear? Fourquet’s study found the answer was insecurité, a term that has a much wider meaning in French. His studies pick up the following examples: they range from anger that 15 types of veil are sold in the market but no pork, to reports of physical assault.

The rise of Saint-Denis France is also the rise of Le Pen Land. “But this has changed the Front National,” says Fourquet. Back in the 1990s many Front National voters used to live in immigrant areas. “The Front’s vote in Seine-Saint-Denis,” he says, “which was very high in the 1990s, has now collapsed to near- non-existent levels due to massive white flight.” This has changed Le Pen’s slogans. “France for the French” has been ditched for “This Is Our Home.”

“What does the slogan mean?” grins Fourquet. “It means we make the law here, and we say how you live. And if you have to go — ‘This Is Our Home’ — it means you have to remind people of it, because it’s no longer so clear.”

The pollster feels France is obsessed with Islam. “It may not sounds like it,” he says, “but areas like Saint-Denis are only small.” This obsession is paranoid. The French believe Muslims make up 31 per cent of their population. In reality, Fourquet estimates Muslims comprise only 7–8 per cent. The internet is filled with viral zombie demography, he explains. Predictions of a Muslim majority by 2050 are baseless. Only 13 per cent of French teenagers are Muslims, and Muslims are expected to reach only 10 per cent of the French population by 2030.

“Yet what we found in our interviews in the Jewish community,” says Fourquet, “was more and more Jews say, there is us, them and you — the ethnic French. Yet again, in our interviews with them, they talk as if they are canaries in the coalmine. This comes up a lot: you’ll see it when were gone and you’ll be left with them — les Arabes. This is dramatic. The sense of a common French destiny is vanishing in our surveys.”

“Enough Anti-French Racism: This Is Our Home.”

This new France is Marine Le Pen’s good fortune. Her rank and file call her Joan of Arc, France’s saintly heroine come to lance the Muslim peril and slay the Brussels Hydra. Marine is the leader of what she calls “the first party of France”. This claim is serious. Her Front now has more members than the governing Socialist party and came first in the first round of 2015’s regional elections with nearly a third of the vote. (In the second round, tactical voting kept them out.) Marine is becoming a serious contender for the presidency.

These are my first memories of the Front National. I was 14 in 2002 when Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine’s father, got 17 per cent of the vote. There were millions of people in the street. I was in Nice with my mother, brother and sisters. We were visiting the tomb of my great-grandmother. Well, since she was gassed and burnt at Auschwitz, she doesn’t have a tomb — only her name carved onto a memorial on a hill overlooking Nice. This is where she was rounded up by the French police. I remember the heat and the barbed wire around our little monument. There was a fat, miserable guardian sitting there, with two huge dogs — without them the Jews’ stone would keep on being defaced.

Now I am 28, and in 2017 it is near-certain that Marine Le Pen will be in the second round of next year’s presidential election. She is polling around 40 per cent in the run-off — and anything under 35 per cent will be seen as a disappointment. There are no marches, no protests — just smiles and selfies.

I am watching a humdrum, 50-strong French protest. The protesters want tougher sentences for the bad drivers who killed their children. Holding portraits and wearing T-shirts printed with pictures of their dead sons and daughters, they gather under four plane trees in a small square just next to L’Assemblée Nationale, France’s parliament.

This is the France that the Front National claims as hers: the France that feels victimised, abandoned, ignored and simply unheard because, isolated, it can’t shout as loudly as a community of Muslims or Jews — the France that feels nobody gives a hoot about it. As they blare into the megaphone Gilbert Collard slinks out of the Assemblée Nationale and joins the crowd. Leftists label him one of the most dangerous men in France. Collard is one of only two FN members of parliament.

It is clear just watching this pink and puffy man how far Le Pen politics has entered the mainstream. Protesters hug him, then they take selfies with him, listen intently and implore him to help. Collard, a brilliant lawyer, smiles. He smells of cigars and in his trench coat radiates a manipulative intelligence. “The first to start our decontamination,” he says. “C’est moi.”

Marine’s MP thinks it was inevitable that France would start voting Le Pen: “For years you can see that we were correct in all our all judgments.” History, he says, has proved them right. Collard smokes with his right hand, and waves his left with dramatic effect. “Our whole diagnosis on immigration, sovereignty, the borders, the problems created by the euro, insecurité and the zones of lawlessness in the banlieues. Alas — it’s all come true. So maybe after all these years the people just want to pick the doctor that gave them the best diagnosis — ten years before the rest.”

The France of Saint-Denis and that of Le Pen are feeding off each other.

Marine Le Pen. The FN poster reads “Brexit: And Now France.”

How much larger can Le Pen Land grow?

Camus says that since Marine took over the party from her father the Front has made spectacular progress, increasing its electorate from some 20 per cent to about 30 per cent of the population. How could the FN achieve this, he asks, when the BNP never had a chance in the UK? The first answer Camus says is technology: the FN has conquered the internet. In Britain, trolling, Twitter and alternative news sites are a leftist thing; in France the FN has built and been echoed by its own alt-media. Websites like www.fdesouche.com — a play on Français de souche, or real, pure, Frenchmen with roots — pump out an alternative news agenda, with stories every day of migrant rapes and Arab knifings. It is among the most popular sites in France.

The second answer, Camus says, is cadres: Jean-Marie had a talent for picking managers and organisers. Marine, he says, has married this to a new talent — strategy. The Front has officially moved away from homophobia, Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism, while abandoning Jean-Marie’s free-market economics. Marine calls this la dédiabolisation — decontamination — and it has been spearheaded by her own new cadres, such as the FN’s new gay vice-president Florian Philipot. “Marine wants to rule,” says Camus. “Jean-Marie preferred to be a spoiler.”

Decontamination is about making the Le Pen name Marine’s and not Jean-Marie’s. At the heart of this is a new umbrella party — Le Rassemblement Bleu Marine — that lets hard rightists sign up to a party unassociated with Jean-Marie. Camus sees the strategy as half-working. Decontamination has brought establishment names to the Front. These include Robert Ménard, the former head of Reporters Without Borders, who is now the Mayor of Beziers, and Gilbert Collard.

“But decontamination is blocked,” says Camus. “Because the Front is still a party alone. It is only an extremely well- performing first-round party.” France’s two-stage electoral system means that a party can’t win an election on only 30 per cent of the vote. Camus thinks that the Front’s attempt to be simultaneously an anti-austerity, anti-Islam and anti-EU protest party has won it a large support base but one that cannot grow. “Swing any more to the centre and it will start to lose votes from the extremes. Swing any more to the protectionist Left it will start to lose votes from the Right.” The Front is also blocked by France’s professionals. For them, quite unlike for France’s poor, a vote for Marine is still largely seen as vulgar and delusional, if no longer totally inexcusable. “This is why Left and Right are still ready to vote for each other to stop the Front passing the threshold. This is the glass ceiling.”

The consensus in Paris is that another terrorist slaughter would shatter it. The radicals of Saint-Denis could tip the radicals of Le Pen Land into power.

How is the old Paris of politicians reacting?

Bruno Le Maire is exactly what French people see when they think of a politician. Blue-eyed, fine-featured, immaculately dressed, Le Maire is a caricature of France’s ruling caste. He is an Énarque, a graduate of l’École Nationale d’Administration — the school that is the French elite, a state-selective political academy of 80–90 students a year that is France’s Eton, Oxford and Cambridge rolled into one. Énarques like Le Maire have a grip on France’s paramount positions from politics to industry.

“Democracy is dead.” I am meeting Le Maire because he is standing for the Right’s nomination for the presidency and he is the third man in the race after Nicolas Sarkozy and Alain Juppé, the Mayor of Bordeaux. “What I mean by democracy is dead is that the system is completely immobile, the system is completely blocked.” He is a former minister, will probably be one again, and if he gets very lucky in the nomination could easily be president.

But is there something deeper at play? “What is happening now has happened several times before.” When France experiences defeat, Le Maire argues, it always comes to believe that its true values are not les droits de l’homme, the values of its confidence — but purity, the countryside, the Church: the values of its fear.

“After the German Empire was declared in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, France threw itself into constructing basilicas everywhere. They felt France had sinned.” This is “the perpetual Pétainist temptation.” Singular, exclusive, defensive — an anti-idea of France.

The Right’s optimists think that a strong candidate could break France’s protectionist labour code, make way for Uber-jobs for the banlieues and impose a crackdown on Islamist segregation. The frontrunner Alain Juppé proposes banning sermons in Arabic, shuttering unregistered mosques, and forcing all imams to qualify with French diplomas.

The Right’s pessimists worry that the institutions of the Fifth Republic are breaking down and the elite’s legitimacy so low that France is becoming un-reformable, entrenching unemployment.

“So if the next president doesn’t do what the French people want and reform,” says Le Maire, “and it continues in paralysis like this, we run a very real chance of Marine Le Pen winning — not in 2017 but in 2022 — and opening up a huge danger for the country.”

The left bank of political Paris is a sad sight. Young activists mill about in the drizzle on the Place de la République. Meaningless graffiti covers the square.The longer I spend with the activists, the clearer it is why the Right think 2017 is in the bag. The Left looks and sounds as if it is coming apart.

“None of the activists who would campaign for Hollande will this time,” says Baki Youssoufou, one of the protest organisers. “He’s a French Blairite.”

France’s bad luck is in the presidency. De Gaulle created a monarchical presidency. Yet France has had five bad kings in a row. Giscard d’Estaing was wasteful. Mitterrand was scheming. Chirac was immobile. Sarkozy was ineffectual.

Hollande has fared even worse. The president has sunk to an abysmal 13 per cent approval rating. He has failed utterly to rule from the Left; he is now attempting to reform from the Right. Hollande’s failure to reduce unemployment on a statist programme means he now has no option but to attempt Sarkozy’s broken promise of a more British liberal labour code. This volte-face has shattered the Left. Unions are striking to stop him. But even Hollande’s ministers are now moving to the right. Emmanuel Macron is the greatest victory for the Right. The 38-year-old economy minister is now raising funds for a presidential run as a centrist candidate — hoping to implement rightist labour reforms on left-wing votes.

The crumbling of the Left is also the growth of Le Pen. Since 1995 the French working class has shown no electoral preference for the Left above that of its professionals. This allowed the Front National to build up two new heartlands in the rustbelts of France’s post-industrial north and east. These young, uneducated, working-class people, whom the Left once saw as its people, now vote for the FN. This has greatly expanded the party’s punch from its southern heartland, where its loyalists are still the families of former French Algerian pied-noirs, reactionary Catholics, farmers and shopkeepers.

Activists around me are trying to stage an anti-Hollande, Occupy-style movement. Limp Palestinian flags droop in the rain. This Haussmann square shrinks the protesters into insignificance. This is a very middle-class affair. Not only do polls show that a majority of French industrial workers plan to vote Le Pen in 2017, but so do a majority of those without qualifications. The Left has lost its hinterland. The FN is now the party of first choice for France’s first-time voters. “Our only hope,” says Youssoufou, “is to take back from Le Pen what she now has — the monopoly of the protest vote.”

The left’s ideology is muddled, the right’s is vague, but Marine’s is crystal clear. They call it Le Grand Remplacement: the idea that France is ceasing to be France demographically, that slowly this century the old majority is being replaced by a new one, of immigrant ethnicity. The Great Replacing boils down to a simple claim. Immigrants are arriving in large numbers and having more children than natives. Unless this is stopped, the idea that true French will become a minority will constantly be on France’s mind.

Front Nationale badge: “Hands Off My Nation.”

My car accelerates down the motorways built by De Gaulle past fields of green under lead skies. The rivers are flooding, and back in Paris precious objects are being removed from the cellars of the Louvre. The road runs straight, over the battlefields of Verdun and past the cemeteries. In the distance rise the rotting hulks of steel plants the General believed France’s independence depended on. “Village for Sale,” shouts a placard. Brown signs announce French history: “The Battle of Valmy.” The GPS bleeps turn off at a signpost for “The Maginot Line.” The Fiat snakes into darkly-forested lanes towards one of the 14 towns with an FN mayor.

I have come to Hayange to find out what is turning France’s north and east into Le Pen Land. Is it unemployment or the fear of the great replacing?

Hayange sits under a motorway bridge. This is one of the towns Marine won in 2014 from the crumbling Left. Rusting smelters sit, locked since 2011, like abandoned rocket-launchers from the space age. Signs for Kronenbourg are stamped on some dozen buildings. Jobless people idle in the street. I spot an aged signpost of a line-drawn pole-dancer over a bolted door. Just like anywhere in poor France things give themselves English names to sound cool: American Bar.

Hayange is a town where most of the restaurants have closed down. Families no longer have the cash for such treats.Unemployment is at 13 per cent. “We’ve had enough of Paris politicians,” sighs Anne, a half-Italian café owner. “We’ve voted for all of them and nothing changes. It’s not like the FN are going to turn on the gas in the crematoriums again.”

Hayange is a town where I expected to meet anger at the France of the Élysée and not the France of Saint-Denis. Yet this is not what I hear at all, even from the unemployed. “I’m 700 per cent, no, 800 per cent for the Front National,” says Michel, an overweight man in his sixties sunning himself on a bench. “Those Arabs, they made shit everywhere! Constantly at war. TV should be exclusively Europe and America: those Arabs — we don’t give a shit.”

A hijabi strolls in front of the church. Islam is here, even in remote France. There are now two halal butchers and one prayer room in this town of 18,000 people. At the café opposite everyone is speaking Arabic, and nobody wants to talk. Unemployed, listless men sit everywhere. Outside a shop I meet an enthusiastic supporter of the mayor. “I love him,” said Madame Fers. “There are too many Arabs in France.” She points at a veiled woman. “This is not normal. We are in France. They should stop behaving like this — it’s like we are no longer in France. It’s like: whose country is this now — theirs?”

I stroll towards the mayor’s office: a hulking, stained-concrete building with the Soviet-feel of provincial Russia. The mayor is the new Front National. Fabien Engelmann is a gay vegetarian and for eight years was a far-left activist with Lutte Ouvrière. “I’m an atheist,” he says. “But I defend Christian civilisation. I would not have voted for the Front National of Jean-Marie Le Pen, because of his economic liberalism, obsession with the war and derogatory comments to a certain community.” He worked in clothes shops and a factory. “I realised,” he says, “after a certain amount of time this internationalist utopia, lovely as it would be, is unrealistic.”

Fabien Engelmann: the Front Nationale’s Mayor of Hayange.

The new Front National mayor rejects the “far-right” label. This is a media and elite smear to scare people away. To prove it, Engelmann says he opposes mass deportation of immigrants with French citizenship. He says he supports a small level of immigration that assimilates itself. He even has Italian migrant roots himself. It’s all about religion, he says, not race.

What made a gay leftist switch from the far Left to the Front? “I realised,” he announces, “my error of interpretation on immigration and Islamisation, which is a danger to liberty.” It was seeing a veiled woman standing for parliament — “that was the click for me.” That and — “all around us this rise of halal, this halalisation of France through its dishes, it’s a conquest of France through its dishes, if you look closely.”

The mayor is no longer fighting class war: he is fighting Saint-Denis. He doesn’t talk about unemployment, austerity or the euro, only France’s ethnic change. “This is the Great Replacing,” he says. “Now go around in Paris, the Gare du Nord . . . you have prayers in the street even when there is a half-empty mosque on Friday morning because it’s really to say this is our territory and we want to impose all that you don’t like.”

The mayor talks like a man utterly convinced, sitting facing a pop-art painting of Tintin and poster of Brigitte Bardot in front of a mini-bust of Mozart. “Go to La Goûte d’Or, the area that was, in the past, one of white wine and the eternal France and the tradition of France — go now and you won’t recognise it at all. This makes me hurt. It makes me hurt to see Paris becoming effectively a land of Islam — little by little a land of Islam.”

Engelmann has a little book on his desk called The Fundamental Principles Of Human Stupidity. He waves it at his political opponents in council.

“France already had a mini civil war,” he says. This is how he sees the banlieue riots of 2005 that saw thousands of cars and even schools set alight. This will never happen again with the Front National he says. “There’s the army, there’s the riot police, there are the forces of order, and then voilà. And listen — if there are a few dead, there are a few dead.”

Not once does the mayor mention Hayange. He only talks about the France of Saint-Denis. His eyes swell up. He talks like a man who sees himself as a French Luke Skywalker in a Star Wars civilisational war against Islam, battling from this obscure planet, Le Grand Remplacement. “Nothing would be as great or as beautiful for us as Brexit. It fills me with excitement and hope to see our allies, our friends marching with happy songs to victory. To destroy the European Union.”

As I drive back to Paris I wonder what I will tell my family. The windscreen is battered with rain. I drive on, over the battlefields of Verdun, past the graves, through the valley of the Marne. The fields are covered in a thin fog, huge, wet — and silent.

Neither Islamists nor nationalists are about to take power. But the hatred between Saint-Denis and Hayange will shape the future of France.

Published in Standpoint Magazine, July 2016.