A tale of three cities, three candidates and rejection of the right's vision for France

MANTES LA JOLIE, a town of 45,000 people, 50 kilometres west of Paris, is that rare phenomenon sought after by journalists and sociologists: a microcosm.

Like France, Mantes split three ways in the first round of parliamentary elections on May 25th, between President Jacques Chirac's ruling centre right Rally for the Republic (RPR), the Socialist Party and the extreme right wing National Front (FN). So this is a tale of three cities, three candidates and three different visions of France.

Mantes caught the country's attention when Ms Marie Caroline Le Pen, the 37 year old daughter of the FN leader, Mr Jean Marie Le Pen, decided to challenge the Socialist and RPR mayors of Mantes la Ville and Mantes la Jolie for the district's seat in parliament.

Mantes represented "all the problems of France: unemployment, immigration, security", Ms Le Pen, a lawyer, told The Irish Times as she made the rounds of polling stations yesterday.

A little girl ran up to Ms Le Pen and asked for her autograph. Clutching a cell phone and wearing sunglasses, high heels, and a chic navy blue suit, the bleached blonde FN candidate could have been mistaken for a film star.

She stooped to kiss the girl, and I asked the child's mother why she was voting FN. "Because we've had Socialists and the RPR," she said, "and nothing ever changes".

Like the Paris government, Mantes has flip flopped between the two leading parties for the past 20 years. The change the FN offers is priority in jobs and housing for French citizens, the closing of French borders and the mass deportation of foreigners. "We'll send the criminals and illegal aliens back first," Ms Le Pen told me.

Her leading score in the first round of the election is symptomatic of the FN's rise to third largest party in the country. The FN's presence in 133 of 565 runoffs drained votes from the RPRUDF centreright. That coalition and the Socialists used to form "Republican fronts" to block the FN's progress. No more.

In this vicious campaign, the centre right demonised the left as much as the racist FN.

The atmosphere in Mantes was one of civil war, Ms Le Pen's deputy, Mr JeanLouis d'Andre told me. "We are fighting to reestablish Republican order," he claimed. When Ms Le Pen visited local markets - flanked by gorilla sized bodyguards - young people from SCALP (Section Completely Against Le Pen) retrieved FN literature from shoppers and threw it into rubbish bags. The SCALPers' favourite chant is "F like Fascist, N like Nazi".

In response to these demonstrators, Mr Le Pen attacked the Socialist candidate, Mrs Annette Peulvast Bergeal, last Friday, scratching her throat when he tried to tear her mayor's tricolour sash off and bruising her when he threw her against a wall.

"The hardest thing for her to get over will be the sight of his hate filled face, the saliva coming out of his mouth, just a few centimetres from her own," an assistant to Mrs Peulvast said yesterday. Mr Le Pen's assault on the Socialist candidate appeared to have backfired; Mrs Peulvast won the seat.

This campaign will leave other scars in Mantes, for it brought out and inflamed the town's divisions. You can see them with the naked eye: up on the hill are well kept villas with lawns and white shutters. The grey stone steeples of the church rise over the winding streets of the old town. Rich Parisians buy farmhouses in the surrounding countryside.

But in the words of the deputy mayor, "it's a pretty town with a wart at one end".

The "wart" is the Val Fourre, France's largest ZUP (Urban Priority Zone) - an aphorism for a slum. Sixty per cent of Val Fourre's 25,000 residents are Arab and African immigrants, brought here in the 1960s to work in nearby Renau It and Peugeot Talbot auto mobile factories. Many were later fired, but (to the disgust of the FN) they stayed on.

The walls of Val Fourre are covered with graffiti attacking Mr Le Pen and the police. Arab families sit on the steps of highrise buildings, rubbish blowing down the streets. When the townspeople of Mantes warn visitors not to come here after dark, they talk about the month long riots of 1991 as if they occurred yesterday: north African youths stole a car and killed a policewoman when they ran a barricade. One of the youths died in prison shortly after, and the rioting started.

The FN says imprisonment and mass deportation is the answer to Mantes problems. Not surprisingly, those immigrants who have French nationality said they were voting Socialist. Mrs Peulvast believes that unemployment - not the immigrants themselves - causes crime. She wants to integrate them, not throw them out.

The centre right, here and else where, failed to address what French people felt were their most pressing problems.

Mr Bedier, the RPR mayor, took Mantes seat in parliament from a Socialist in the centre right's 1993 landslide victory. But he was one of those who encouraged President Chirac to dissolve parliament and led a disastrous campaign. Like other members of the outgoing majority, he was overconfident from the start. The FN call him arrogant and disdainful. The Socialists were equally scathing, especially after Mr Bedier - no doubt hoping to win over some of the FN voters - took the extraordinary step of blaming the innocent Mrs Peulvast for last Friday's punchup, saying his Socialist rival's attitude had been "scandalous, unacceptable and irresponsible".

Mr Bedier would not deign to talk to the press yesterday but when I asked his deputy, Mr Denis Belacel what was at stake in this election, he recited the centreright credo like a broken record. "It's about how France will be managed, about its future and that of Europe. If the people want a future, they have to vote for the right, that's it. If we have a majority we can get things done. We are not with the FN fascists, and the left want to take us backwards." That, in a nutshell, was the message rejected by French voters yesterday.