WITH its shuttered façades, narrow streets and shaded main square, this small southern town has a certain Provençal charm. It boasts a twice-weekly market, two well-equipped sports halls, a public library and a narrow strip of beach. Yet an intangible air of disappointment hangs over Cogolin. Its poverty rate is well above the national average. Unemployment, at 18%, is nearly twice that of France as a whole. Many of those with jobs belong to the army of workers who repaint, clean, mow and cook at the villas and yachts of nearby Saint-Tropez. In 2014 the town elected a mayor from the xenophobic National Front (FN) with 53% of the vote.

Nearly three years into his term, Marc Etienne Lansade embodies the new-look FN. There are no shaven heads to be found at the town hall. With his monogrammed shirts and leather loafers, this former property developer from a chic suburb of Paris talks at length of his plans to develop Cogolin’s marina. He has taken on debt, partly to pay for extra local policemen. He is unapologetic about favouring expressions of Roman Catholic identity, such as a Christmas nativity scene in the town hall, dismissing critics of such gestures as “leftist Islamophiles”. He may come across as a hard-right deal-maker, but not as a thug.

Local opponents accuse him of financing his development plans in “opaque” ways and an “ideological” hostility to cultural diversity, such as North African songs or dances in schools. The voters, though, seem undeterred. The year after they elected Mr Lansade, 54% of voters in Cogolin backed the FN candidate, Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, niece of Marine Le Pen, the FN’s leader, at regional elections. And a great many will vote for Ms Le Pen herself in the first round of the forthcoming presidential election on April 23rd.

No precedents for the president

At a Cogolin bakery where Algerian pastries are nestled next to the baguettes, a middle-aged woman, asked about her country’s politicians, says she has “a real desire to kick them all up the backside”. Over the past few months almost all the most prominent of them, save Ms Le Pen, have thus been kicked. In the centre-right primary, held in November, voters rejected an ex-president, Nicolas Sarkozy, and an ex-prime minister, Alain Juppé. In January’s Socialist primary they turfed out another ex-prime minister, Manuel Valls. They would have rejected François Hollande, too, had he not already bowed out of the race—an unprecedented move for a sitting French president.

This bonfire of the elites has left France with a slate of candidates all but one of whom were not considered serious contenders for any party’s nomination six months ago. One of them, Emmanuel Macron, a former Socialist economy minister, is a candidate without the backing of an established party but with a real chance of victory, another unprecedented development. Benoît Hamon, the Socialist Party’s candidate, is a former backbench rebel against his own party. The centre-right nominee, François Fillon, will be put under formal investigation on March 15th accused of abusing his office to pay unearned salaries to his family; nevertheless, he says he will fight on.

And then there is Ms Le Pen. The populist leader, who has run the FN since 2011, leads The Economist’s poll of polls (see chart 1). There is a good chance that she will come top in the first round of the election—again, something for which there is no precedent. (When her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the FN’s founder and former leader, got into the second round in 2002 it was as the first-round runner-up, with just 17% of the vote). For the other candidates the election has become a race to stand against her in the second round on May 7th, and the campaign a test of the ability of mainstream politicians to shape a response to renascent nationalism.

Ms Le Pen will find it difficult to win in the second round; as yet, no poll has shown her doing so. One recently found her losing to Mr Macron by 42% to 58%; against Mr Fillon she does a bit better. But the margins leave little room for complacency. She is a strong campaigner, with a well organised party. Mr Macron, for all that he is fighting an insurgent campaign, can be painted as a very establishment character—of the sort who came off much worse in the votes for Brexit and Donald Trump than elite opinion expected. Many voters remain undecided, and more may still be biddable. Over two-fifths of those who have made a choice admit that they may yet change it. Nicolas Baverez, a lawyer and commentator, compares France’s mood to that of 1930, when fascism was on the rise, or even 1789, the eve of the French revolution. In the parquet-floored salons of Paris, conversation readily turns to such sombre parts of history. “The historian in me is very pessimistic,” says Dominique Moïsi, of the Institut Montaigne, a think-tank, “because I know that these things can happen.” The election of Ms Le Pen would not only bring to power a leader who has compared Muslims praying in the street to the Nazi occupation of France. It would prompt a crisis of government: the FN is highly unlikely to win a majority in June’s legislative elections, even if she is president. And it would threaten the future of Europe. Ms Le Pen has promised to abandon the euro in favour of a new franc and to hold a referendum on leaving the EU within her first six months (though she would need parliamentary approval to do so). The EU can survive the loss of Britain; the loss of France would bring the project that has underpinned the European order for the past 60 years to a close.

The new geography puts all in doubt

In some ways, the emergence of Ms Le Pen matches a pattern of insurgent populism across Western liberal democracies. A fear of job losses due to automation and deindustrialisation; a backlash against immigration; a distrust of self-serving political elites; the echo-chamber effect of information spread on social media: common factors helping populist political movements elsewhere have touched France, too.

Ms Le Pen’s support, like support for Mr Trump and Brexit, is well correlated with education. Only 8% of French citizens with a degree voted FN in 2014; 41% of those without a high-school diploma did. As with Mr Trump, men are better disposed to the FN than women. Ms Le Pen, like Mr Trump, is particularly popular in old industrial towns from which jobs and confidence have drained away, taking with them faith in parties of the left (see chart 2).

Perhaps the most distinctive aspect of the FN vote, though, is the faultline it reveals between the country’s cosmopolitan cities, at ease with globalisation, and those in-between places where farmland gives way to retail sprawl and a sense of neglect. Between 2006 and 2011, the number of jobs in 13 big French cities—Lyon, Marseille, Toulouse, Lille, Bordeaux, Nantes, Nice, Strasbourg, Rennes, Grenoble, Rouen, Montpellier and Toulon—increased on average by 5%. In France as a whole, jobs were lost. These dynamic cities, with their elegant pedestrian centres, tech hubs and gourmet food, vote for the left (Lyon, Nantes, Rennes), the greens (Grenoble) or the centre-right (Bordeaux). They are not immune to France’s feeling of being fed up; in April and May, many of them may opt for Mr Macron. But none registers a strong vote for the FN.

Around them, though, is what Christophe Guilluy, a geographer, calls “peripheral France”. This is the world of lost employers like the Lejaby lingerie factory in Bellegarde-sur-Valserine, in the foothills of the Alps, or the Moulinex factory in Alençon, in southern Normandy. It is a world where Uber, bike-share schemes and co-working spaces are nowhere to be found, and where people sense that globalisation has passed them by. It is a world where the FN is on the rise.

The FN’s first base was in the south, where Mr Le Pen built support among French settlers returning from independent Algeria in the 1970s. Its second was the rust-belt of the north and east, where it scooped up the disappointed vote that once went to socialists or communists. Maps by Hervé Le Bras, a demographer, show that the FN now has a third home in Mr Guilluy’s peripheral areas—beyond the outskirts of the cities, but not deeply rural. In a ring of communes between 40km and 50km from the centre of Paris, for example, the FN’s candidate in the 2015 regional elections, Wallerand de Saint-Just, won 32% of the vote. In places 80km out or more, he scored fully 41% (see chart 3).

Isolation boosts FN support. “The farther you live from a railway station”, says Mr Le Bras, “the more you are likely to vote FN.” France has high-quality public services, and its citizens have matching expectations for the fabric of their lives. When that fabric thins—when a local butcher closes, or a doctor leaves town—they feel neglect. A common factor behind the FN vote in such places, says Jérôme Fourquet, director of Ifop, is “a sense of abandonment, of being left behind by an elite that doesn’t care.” Ms Le Pen exploits this sentiment with uncanny skill. Born into politics and raised in a mansion in a swish Parisian suburb, she somehow manages to speak for those she calls the country’s “forgotten” in a way they find credible. The reason this works is partly Ms Le Pen’s shrewd feel for simple language and anti-elite slogans. But it is also because France has been going through an unusually unsettled time that has left people looking beyond the established parties and given French populism distinctive features. One is a sense that a great country, the cradle of human rights and the Enlightenment, has somehow lost its way. This is particularly obvious in economic terms. Since the end of the trente glorieuses, the three decades of strong growth that followed the second world war, it has been debt, rather than growth, that has financed the high-speed trains, the blooming municipal flower beds and the generous provisions for child care, ill health, job loss and old age that are the hallmark of France’s splendid public sector. French public spending now accounts for a greater share of GDP than it does in Sweden. But no French government has balanced its budget since 1974. Over the past 15 years, there has been a particular décrochage, or decoupling, between the French economy and that of Germany, its closest ally. In 2002 the two countries enjoyed comparable GDP per head. Germany, under Gerhard Schröder, began to reform itself. France, under Jacques Chirac, didn’t. Today, Germans have 17% more purchasing power per person. Labour costs in France have risen faster than in Germany, deterring the creation of permanent jobs and undermining competitiveness. The country’s share of all goods exports between EU countries has dropped from 13.4% to 10.5%.

Most devastating is unemployment. In 2002, it was a tad higher in Germany. Today it has dropped to 4% on that side of the Rhine, but in France it remains stuck at 10%, and at 25% for the under-25s. Over 80% of new jobs are on short-term contracts, with “short-term” often meaning just a month. A generation of young French people has grown up outside the country’s famously protected job market. The votes for Mr Trump or Brexit were weakest among the under 25s; but the young French support the FN more than any other party. (Conversely, older voters have much less truck with Ms Le Pen than their Anglophone peers did with Brexit and Mr Trump; polls say they fear for their savings and pensions if France leaves the euro.)

Shame isn’t a strong enough emotion

Economic self-doubt has been compounded by a sense of what Laurent Bouvet, a political scientist, calls “cultural insecurity”. Three big terrorist attacks within the space of 18 months, in 2015 and 2016, battered France’s confidence. The coming presidential election will be conducted under a state of emergency which has been renewed four times since November 2015. The French have had to learn to live with soldiers patrolling the streets and railway stations, a daily visual reminder of their vulnerability.

Legitimate worries about terrorism have supplied fertile ground for insidious identity politics. As the home to one of Europe’s biggest Muslim minorities, France is more alert than, say, Italy or Spain to hints of religious extremism. Moreover, the country has a pre-existing and unforgiving framework for managing religious expression—known as laïcité—which recent governments, fearing a threat to secularism, have tightened up. When this provokes a row—over Muslim head-coverings, say—it plays straight into Ms Le Pen’s hands; she has little trouble persuading voters that their values are under threat. France, she tells her flag-waving rallies, faces nothing less than “submersion”.

Ms Le Pen succeeds not because of the way her policies, which include a lower retirement age, more taxes on foreign workers and massive increases in spending on the armed forces, would tackle economic insecurity or the threat of terror (they wouldn’t). It is because of her talent for blending two strands of populism: anti-immigrant talk about values and churches, strong in the south, and anti-market discourse about jobs and the system, favoured in the north. On both counts, she can tap into French history.

Ms Le Pen may have purged the FN of the overt anti-Semitism and neo-Nazi imagery of her father’s era. Yet her party remains originally rooted in a nostalgia for colonial Algeria and supporters of Marshal Pétain, who collaborated with the Nazis. Churches, flags and the homeland remain potent symbols in this world. Campaigning in Provence Ms Maréchal-Le Pen frequently recalls the country’s roots in Christendom. At her aunt’s political rallies, supporters can be heard chanting: “On est chez nous” (This is our home).

At the same time, anti-establishment politics fits her compatriots’ self-image as a nation of revolutionaries, pitchforks in hand. When Mr Le Pen was first elected to the National Assembly, in 1956, it was on a list led by Pierre Poujade, who evoked this tradition when he spoke up for “the little people”: “The downtrodden, the trashed, the ripped off, the humiliated.” It is no coincidence that Ms Le Pen’s campaign slogan is “In the name of the people”.

A final ingredient gives French populism a further twist: Euroscepticism. Invaded three times by Germany since 1870, and on its fifth republic, France has a long disrupted history, insecure even in peace. After the second world war it dealt with this by building Europe—a project by which it sought to bind in Germany and to amplify its own power. The French regarded the ceding of sovereignty as a means of reinforcing, not undermining, their nation state.