Last month, Sophie-Laurence Roy, a conservative lawyer from Paris with roots in Burgundy, decided to cut across the political divide that defined post-war France and devote herself to a nationalist, far-right political movement that looks set to dominate parliamentary elections on Sunday.
“I realized that I would blame myself for the rest of my life if I didn’t offer my services to the great movement of change that is the National Rally,” she said as she ate a pork intestine sausage at a café in Chablis, the northern Burgundian town known for its fine white wine. “It was now or never.”
On June 9, Ms. Roy, 68, left her center-right political family, the Republicans, who trace their beliefs to war hero Charles de Gaulle, to support Marine Le Pen’s far-right party, whose quasi-fascist roots lie in the collaborationist Vichy regime against which de Gaulle fought to liberate France.
How could she bridge such a gap? “My problem is not the past, it’s tomorrow,” said Ms. Roy, now a candidate affiliated with the National Rally in the largest constituency in the Yonne district, which includes Chablis, dismissively. “People are suffering.”
Some 9.3 million people voted for the Rassemblement National in the first round of the election last weekend, more than double the 4.2 million who voted in the first round of the 2022 legislative elections. Spread across most regions of France, they were workers and pensioners, young and old, women and men. Tired of the status quo, they came together to roll the dice for change.
Now it looks set to become France’s largest party after the second round of voting, even if it now seems unlikely to win an outright majority, as Ms Le Pen’s party — a party that has softened its image and message but retained a core of anti-immigration and Eurosceptic convictions.
It is not enough to say that the taboo against voting for the far right has disappeared; the taboo has disappeared in a tidal wave of support for Rassemblement National.
This has heightened tensions across the country, with the Interior Ministry announcing that 30,000 police officers will be deployed on Sunday “to prevent the risk of disorder.”
Residents of this sparsely populated region of France – the Yonne district in northwestern Burgundy has just 335,000 inhabitants – describe what is happening to their community as “desertification,” by which they mean an emptying of services and of their lives.
Schools are closing. Train stations are closing. Post offices are closing. Doctors and dentists are leaving. Cafes and small local shops are closing, squeezed out by megastores. People are having to travel further for services, jobs and food. Many travel in their old cars, but are being encouraged by the authorities to switch to electric cars, which are far too expensive for their wallets.
At the same time, gas and electricity bills have skyrocketed since the war in Ukraine, leading some to turn off their heating last winter. They feel invisible and barely getting by; and on their televisions they see President Emmanuel Macron explaining the crucial importance of such abstract policies as European “strategic autonomy.” It is not their concern.
Then there is the National Manifestation, which says that the emphasis is on people, not on ideas, but on people’s purchasing power.
“My party is anchored in this area, it is not trying, like our president, to give moral lessons to the whole world,” Ms Roy said.
The omnipresent discomfort is not always easy to grasp. The beautiful rolling hills of the Yonne, the rows of Chablis vines on the slopes above the Serein River and the golden wheat fields in the afternoon sunlight do not suggest unrest. Yet there is more discontent brewing on French soil than is immediately apparent.
In the central square of Chablis, as in most French towns and villages, stands a monument to the toll of war. “Chablis to its Glorious Dead,” reads the inscription above a list of 13 dead in the 1870-71 war with Germany, 76 dead in World War I, four dead in World War II, two dead in the Indochina War and one dead in the Algerian War.
Above the monument fly the French flag and the blue and gold flag of the European Union, a symbol of the commitment to end war through European integration, the process by which borders were abolished and France was given its ideological framework and moral foundation from 1945 onwards.
That framework and foundation are now shaky.
The National Rally wants to give power back to the nation. It wants to strengthen the European Union’s open internal borders to slow migration. It is ready to mythologize national greatness, in a lower tone than the 20th-century hysterical merchants who plunged the continent into war, but with the same dizzying, scapegoat-identifying intent.
The ground is fertile for such appeals. “Our French heartland feels forgotten,” said André Villiers, a centrist affiliated with Mr. Macron’s party — and Ms. Roy’s opponent in Sunday’s runoff. “What you see here in the rise of the National Rally is anger and alienation.”
Mr Villiers, 69, the current deputy and a lawmaker in the National Assembly since 2017, was sitting in a cafe in the pretty town of Vézelay, about 30 miles south of Chablis.
Nearby was the 1,000-year-old Vézelay Abbey, said to contain relics of Mary Magdalene. It has long been an important place of pilgrimage associated with miracles. Mr. Villiers may need one, given the results of the first round of voting in his district.
“Macron is at his lowest point,” he said. “People want him gone, his page has turned and that doesn’t help.”
In the first round of voting, Mr Villiers took 29.3 per cent of the vote, compared with 44.5 per cent for Ms Roy. The left-wing candidate, who has since withdrawn and urged his supporters to use their votes to prevent a National Rally victory, took 19.5 per cent. Ms Roy is the favourite, although the outcome is likely to be close.
In Avallon, near Vézelay, I met Pascal Tissier, 64, who recently retired after working as a traveling salesman. He voted for Mr Villiers in the first round, “but now I am inclined to vote for the National Rally, because something is happening that has been simmering for a long time.”
“What?” I asked.
“I turned off the heating in my house a few months ago because the bill had become impossible,” he said. “The bus services have been cancelled. I have to travel 45 minutes to Tonnerre because the tax office here is closed. It’s simple: people feel slighted by Macron.”
Life has become more difficult in other ways. His father is 90 and lives alone in Rouvray, 12 miles away. Every two days, Mr. Tissier brings him food, because the only remaining grocery store in his father’s home closed a few months ago. The local doctor retired this year.
“The government is not paying attention to this,” Mr. Tissier said. “It’s bizarre.”
Into this kind of vacuum, on the other side of the country, stepped the National Rally. The party claims to have shaken off its xenophobic, intolerant past, but every now and then, even in the Yonne, the old clichés resurface, like the gloved arm of Dr. Strangelove.
Last week, Daniel Grenon, the incumbent deputy and National Rally candidate in another constituency of the Yonne, declared that “North Africans have no place in high office.” He was apparently referring to French citizens of North African descent or with dual nationality. The secretary of the Yonne Socialist Party immediately denounced him for incitement to hatred and discrimination.
Jordan Bardella, the smooth-talking 28-year-old leader of the National Rally in the election campaign, who has tried to distance the party from overt prejudice, said in a television interview that Mr. Grenon’s statement was “despicable.” Asked whether he would continue to support the candidate, Mr. Bardella said that if re-elected, Mr. Grenon would no longer be part of the National Rally group in the National Assembly.
Another MP and National Rally candidate, Roger Chudeau, infuriated Ms Le Pen last week by saying that a former education minister, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, who has dual French and Moroccan nationality, had “destroyed the high school” and that ministerial positions should go to “French-French people, and that is definitive.”
“I am shocked by our colleague Chudeau,” said Ms Le Pen. Yet the supposed dilution of Frenchness by immigrants remains at the heart of her party’s message.
Mr Villiers believes the threat to the Republic from the National Rally remains real. “The fuse between us and the bomb is short,” he said. “We know how this starts and how it ends. I will fight to the end.”
He called Ms. Roy’s move from the Republicans to the National Rally “a serious moral desertion.”
In Chablis, a winemaking town that relies on exports for much of its income, the National Rally’s emerging message is troubling to some. “Closing borders doesn’t work for us,” said Damien Leclerc, the general manager of a large wine cooperative, La Chablisienne. Last year, 62 percent of its $67 million in sales came from exports.
Winemakers are dependent on the outside world in other ways, too. “We need migrant workers to do all the manual work,” Mr. Leclerc said. “We need them to weed, to prune the vines, to trellise the vines, jobs that the French generally don’t want to do.”
Ridial Diamé, 38, a Senegalese worker, was about to have lunch when I found him in the vineyards of Chablis on a steep hillside. It was noon; he had started work early in the morning, mainly weeding on an estate called Domaine Goulley where no chemical sprays are used. A Muslim with a wife and two children in Senegal, he had previously worked in Spain and is on a temporary contract in Chablis.
“It’s pretty good work,” he said. “I work 35 hours a week for about $13 an hour; we get three days off. I stay as long as I can.”
What did he think of the anti-immigration policies of Rassemblement National?
“It’s very funny,” he said. “The French don’t want to do this work, so we do it. And then they say they don’t want us!”
