The FN's hate figures have now been extended to include Brussels and above all Uncle Sam

The FN's hate figures have now been extended to include Brussels and, above all, Uncle Sam.After messing around for 25 years with the usual ultra-right-wing obsessions, from race to taxes, the Front has found that the great theme of the 1990s has fallen into its lap. The FN is energetically exploiting the fin de siecle anxiety which exists in almost every Western country: the fear that national cultural and economic identity may be submerged by a global culture and a global economy. To this it has added a virulent Europhobia, promoting the same fears of culture-crushing Euro-Federalism as the nationalist right wing of the British Conservative Party.And - surprise, surprise - who, according to Front dogma, pulls the strings to promote globalism and "Euro-Federasty"? The Jews and the Freemasons.Anti-Americanism, or fear of swamping by le culture Anglo-Saxon, exists in many areas of French society. It co-exists with an insatiable appetite for hamburgers, baseball caps and American movies on TV. The Front has taken the two facts and plaited them into a conspiracy by "Big Brother" America (and the usual suspects) to destroy the French nation and the French way of life.

The FN's summer university last year became a Khomeini-esque feast of denunciation of the Great Satan. Le Pen said the US had become the "wooden horse of globalism" attempting to impose the "hegemony of a rootless and globalist ideology". His son-in-law Samuel Marechal said that, once in power, the FN would re-impose "croque-madames and cognac-Schweppes instead of hamburgers and whisky-Coca".This is the Front's standard demagogic technique applied to a new enemy: authentic fears and quasi-facts are intercut with fantasies, obscuring the boundaries between reality and paranoia. It is easy to make fun but the Front's new anti-American, anti-globalist crusade is gaining converts.

Quite independently of the FN's efforts, France has been seized by an exaggerated crisis of confidence in the capacity of France and Frenchness to survive in the modern world. One hears intelligent, Le Pen-fearing people suggesting that, on this issue, the Front is "asking the right questions". Borrowing a favourite word from Megret, it is a short step from that to the "banalisation" of the Front's extremist answers.Events are conspiring to help the Front in other ways. There is now a widespread contempt in France for the traditional governing elites and for mainstream parties. As Le Pen pointed out with delight at the Toulon rally, over 500 politicians, mostly obscure, some well known, have been convicted or charged with corruption in recent years. Many of these cases flow from the institutionally dishonest methods of financing political parties which began to fall apart two or three years ago. Some involve outright embezzlement.A financially minor, but politically serious, series of charges hangs over the head of the Mayor of Paris, Jean Tiberi, a close friend and party colleague of President Chirac.

A series of court cases is just beginning on the slush-funding of the Socialist Party. Bernard Tapie, an emblematic radical-left figure of the late-Mitterrand years, and a vigorous assailant of the Front National, is in jail for manifold swindles.The last 16 years - the period of the rise of Le Pennism - has seen an apparently healthy alternation, and even co-habitation, of left and centre- right. But it is a frequent complaint that both left and right, once elected, have abandoned their promises and nostrums. Until the last couple of years, there has been a great continuity and similarity in the politics of both main political families.