Last month, Sophie Laurence-Roy, a conservative Paris lawyer with roots in Burgundy, decided to cross the political boundaries that have defined France’s post-war history and commit herself to a far-right nationalist political movement that is likely to dominate in Sunday’s parliamentary elections.
“I thought I would be damned for the rest of my life if I didn’t join this great movement for change, this National Union,” she said, eating pig-intestine sausages at a cafe in Chablis, a town in northern Burgundy known for its fine white wines. “It’s now or never.”
So on June 9, Mr. Roy, 68, left the Republicans, a longtime center-right political family that traces its faith back to wartime hero Charles de Gaulle, to support Marine Le Pen’s far-right party, whose quasi-fascist roots lie in de Gaulle’s collaboration with the Vichy government as it fought to liberate France.
How can she cross such a divide? “My problem is not the past, it’s tomorrow,” said Roy, now a candidate aligned with the National Rally in the largest constituency in the Yonne department, which includes Chablis, disdainfully. “People are suffering.”
Some 9.3 million people voted for the National Rally in the first round of the elections, held last weekend, more than double the 4.2 million who voted in the first round of the 2022 parliamentary elections. Spread across most regions of France, they included workers and pensioners, young and old, women and men. Fed up with the status quo, they came together to take a gamble for change.
Le Pen’s party has softened its image and smoothed its message but retains its core anti-immigration and eurosceptic beliefs, and although it now looks unlikely to win an absolute majority, it looks set to become France’s largest party after the second round of voting.
It is not enough to say that the taboo against voting for the far right has disappeared: it has collapsed in the wave of support for the National Rally.
As a result, tensions rose across the country, and the Interior Ministry announced that 30,000 police officers would be deployed on Sunday “to prevent the risk of unrest”.
Residents in this sparsely populated region of France (the Yonne department in northwest Burgundy has a population of just 335,000) describe what is happening to their communities as “desertification” – a disappearance of services and a void of life.
Schools are closed. Train stations are closed. Post offices are closed. Doctors and dentists are withdrawing. Cafes and small convenience stores are closing down to compete with bigger stores. People have to travel further for services, jobs and food. Many get around in old cars, but authorities are encouraging them to switch to electric vehicles, priced well beyond their financial means.
At the same time, gas and electricity prices have risen sharply since the war in Ukraine, and some people turned off their heating last winter. They feel invisible, just getting by. On TV, they watch President Emmanuel Macron preach about abstract policies such as European “strategic autonomy.” That’s not what they’re interested in.
National rallies have also been held, arguing that the focus is on people, not ideologies, and above all on people’s purchasing power.
“My party is rooted in this region and we are not trying to give moral lessons to the whole world like the president is,” Roy said.
The widespread sense of unrest is not always easy to understand — the beautiful rolling hills of the Yonne, the Chablis vineyards lining the cliffs above the Serans River, and the golden wheat fields bathed in the afternoon sun are no indication of unrest — but there is more discontent simmering on French soil than might at first glance be apparent.
Chablis’s central square, like most towns and villages in France, has a memorial to the war dead: “The Glorious Fallen of Chablis” reads above a list of 13 men killed in the 1870-1871 war with Germany, 76 in World War I, four in World War II, two in the Indochina War, and one in the Algerian War.
Flying above the memorial are the French flag and the blue-and-gold European Union flag, symbols of the determination to end war through European integration, a process that eliminated borders and gave France its ideological framework and moral foundation after 1945.
That framework and foundation is now unstable.
The National Coalition wants to return power to the nation-state. It wants to tighten the European Union’s open internal borders to slow migration. It is ready to mythologize national greatness with as little fuss as the 20th-century hysteria-mongers who plunged the continent into war, but with the same dizzying intent of scapegoating.
There is fertile ground for such appeals. “The heartland of France feels forgotten,” said André Villiers, a centrist in Mr Macron’s party and Mr Roy’s opponent in Sunday’s runoff election. “What you see in the growing excitement of the National Rally is anger and alienation.”
The 69-year-old Villiers, a member of the National Assembly since 2017, was sitting in a cafe in Vézelay, a picturesque town about 30 miles south of Chablis.
Nearby, the 1,000-year-old Abbey of Vézelay, said to house the relics of Mary Magdalene, has long been an important pilgrimage site linked to miracles, and Villiers may need one given the results of the first round of voting in his constituency.
“Macron is at his lowest point,” he said. “The people want him gone, the page has been turned on him, and that’s not going to help.”
In the first round, Villiers won 29.3% of the vote to Roy’s 44.5%. A left-wing candidate who has already withdrawn from the race and called on his supporters to vote to stop the National Rally from winning, won 19.5%. Roy has the lead, but the result is likely to be close.
In Avallon, near Vézelay, I met Pascal Tissier, 64, recently retired from working as a travelling salesman. He said he voted for Villiers in the first round but “now I feel like voting for the National Coalition, because something that has been building up for a long time is happening.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“A few months ago I turned off the heating in my house because I couldn’t pay the bills,” he said. “The bus service has stopped. The tax office here is closed so I have to travel 45 minutes to Tonnerre. The reason is simple: people feel neglected by Macron.”
Life has been difficult in other ways too. Mr. Tissier’s 90-year-old father lives alone in Louvre, 12 miles away. The last grocery store nearby closed a few months ago, so Mr. Tissier delivers food to him every two days. The local doctor retired this year.
“The government is not paying any attention to this,” Tissier said. “It’s strange.”
Into this vacuum across the country has stepped the Rally National. The party says it has abandoned its xenophobic and bigoted past, but from time to time, including in the Yonne, old tropes resurface, like the gloved arm in Dr. Strangelove.
Last week, Daniel Grenon, the incumbent National Coalition candidate in another Yonne constituency, declared that “North Africans are not qualified to hold high office,” apparently referring to French citizens of North African descent or with dual nationality. The secretary of the Yonne Socialist Party immediately sued him for inciting hatred and discrimination.
Jordan Bardella, 28, who led the National Coalition in the campaign and has tried to distance the party from overt bigotry, said in a television interview that Glennon’s comments were “despicable.” Asked if he would continue to support the candidate, Bardella said he would not attend parliament with the National Coalition group if Glennon was re-elected.
Another Rally National candidate, Roger Sudeau, infuriated Le Pen last week by saying that former Education Minister Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, a dual French-Moroccan citizen, had “destroyed secondary schools” and that the ministerial position “should be given to a French person, that’s decisive.”
“I was shocked by my colleague Sudeau,” Ms Le Pen said. But the argument that immigration makes the country less French remains central to the party’s message.
Villiers believes the threat the National Coalition poses to the Republic remains real. “It’s a short distance between us and the bomb,” he said. “We know how this starts and how it ends, and I intend to fight to the end.”
He called Roy’s switch from the Republican Party to the national convention a “gross moral abdication.”
The growing national rally has some concerned in Chablis, a wine-growing city that relies on exports for much of its income. “There’s no point in closing the border,” said Damien Leclerc, secretary general of La Chablisienne, a major wine cooperative that generated 62 percent of its $67 million in sales last year from exports.
Winegrowers depend on the outside world in other ways too: “We need immigrant workers for all the manual work,” says Leclerc. “We need them to do the weeding, the pruning, the trellises: the jobs that the French generally don’t want to do.”
I found Senegalese worker Lydiard Diamé, 38, on his lunch break in a steep-sided Chablis vineyard. It was midday. He’d been working since early morning, mainly weeding the chemical-free estate of Domaine Gouly. A Muslim with a wife and two children in Senegal, he previously worked in Spain and now works on a temporary contract in Chablis.
“It’s a pretty good job,” he says. “I work 35 hours a week for about $13 an hour, with three days off. I work as many hours as I can.”
What did he think of the National Rally’s anti-immigration policies?
“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!”