EVERY election campaign has its vocabulary. The words on the lips of French politicians since President Jacques Chirac dissolved parliament on April 21st are changement, elan, mondialisation and liberalisme.
In a country whose citizens fight reform tooth and nail, changement is the thing voters clamour for and politicians promise.
Consider the campaign slogans: Le grand changement, La grande alternative, Changeons d'avenir (Change the future).
But nobody has found the philosopher's stone to transform the base metal of party programmes into the gold ore of change. Asked to define the changement his governing, coalition offered, Mr Alain Juppe, the outgoing Prime Minister, said it was "neither a break nor continuity" with the past. Hmmm.
President Chirac's pet word was elan a surge or burst of energy, as in nouvel elan and elan partage (shared elan). When Mr Juppe announced he was about to resign, the words elan partage were printed on the podium before him.
The slogan seemed grotesquely inappropriate as the Prime Minister of the world's fourth richest country gave up in disgrace after an election defeat.
Perhaps wisely, President Chirac finally dropped the word elan altogether in his Tuesday night address to the nation.
Unfortunately for the President, the word elan also means moose, a coincidence which led Le Monde's Pierre Georges to write the funniest column of the campaign this week. In an old schoolbook, Georges found this description of the beast evoked constantly by the centreright: "The movement of the elan, although it is rapid is accompanied by an extraordinary creaking so loud that it seems that all the joints of its legs are dislocating."
The nouvel elan and the elan partage were badly stricken with this infirmity once the first round results were known, Georges wrote. No one knew what would happen in the second round, but one thing was certain: the promised elan had just passed away, "in a memorable crashing of bones, in the cemetery of mooses
Without naming the evil monster that embodies French fears of the outside world, Mr Chirac briefly tried to do a public relations job for mondialisation (globalisation).
"Our world has undergone irreversible changes," he wrote in an open letter. "New technologies appear, modifying behaviour and working conditions. Alliances are forged across continents. Such is the course of history. Are we going to turn our back on it, pull into ourselves, begin a process of decline? Or shall we seize the opportunity?"
With the extreme right wing National Front and the left wing coalition warning of the dangers of mondialisation and its ideological variant, le mondialisme, Mr Chirac was swimming against the tide. In his Tuesday night speech, he dropped apologies for globalisation; instead, he promised to construct a new social model that would protect the citizens of France "against the effects of mondialisation".
If globalisation is an almost mystical force, buffeting France from afar, le liberalisme is the creed of those who collaborate with it.
In the minds of the French, liberalism conjures up sweatshops. exploitation and the absence of legal constraints that creates so many working poor in Britain and the US. When they really want to frighten supporters, politicians tag on the prefix "ultra" or "hyper". The centre right tiptoes around the word, alluding instead to "initiative" and "freedom".
So Mr Edouard Balladur, the former prime minister, was unusually daring this week when he told Le Monde: "We, must, invent a liberalisme a la francaise and not copy the Anglo Saxon model."
