There was a time when Le Pen was the FN and the FN was Le

"There was a time when Le Pen was the FN and the FN was Le Pen Now it has become too big for one man. It has escaped from him a little." Running town halls is a double- edged honour: it confers respectability; but also, for the first time, responsibility. So far the Front's municipal record is a bizarre mix of obsessive street-cleaning and petty provocations: banning "far-leftist" publications, such as the perfectly respectable Liberation, from local libraries and cancelling special school-lunches for Jewish and Muslim pupils.There is no internal threat to Le Pen's leadership - that would be inconceivable (at present). But there are the beginnings of a threat to his personal supremacy. The threat comes from Bruno Megret, the man most responsible for giving the party a more modern political face; a man alleged by his opponents to be a more committed racist than Le Pen; the de facto Number Two of the party; and the de facto winner of the pivotal election at Vitrolles.

Megret's wife, Catherine, ran as a substitute because he was banned after irregularities in a previous election. But there is no doubt who really won, both in Vitrolles and within the party.The Strasbourg conference may actually give the first real clues as to how the two men intend to manage their submerged, but steadily growing, rivalry. With the parliamentary elections looming next year, French democracy is at a crossroads; but then so is the Front National.Lorrain de Saint Affrique was for 10 years Le Pen's media guru and one of his closest political advisers. He was ejected from the party in 1994 for suggesting in public that Megret was leading the FN towards fascism and surrounding himself with neo-Nazis. You may wonder what de Saint Affrique thought was happening in the FN before. He argues that the party's pursuit of working-class votes, and its shameless espousal of almost socialist, anti-capitalist themes, has taken it far away from the party he first knew in 1984.

He describes the old FN as Reagan-Thatcher Plus: economically liberal and socially authoritarian.De Saint Affrique, who still receives threats from Front sympathisers, is cautious about revealing his address or meeting me in public He agreed to meet only in my office. Chain-smoking American cigarettes, he sketches two contradictory scenarios. On the one hand, the Front may be on the threshold of a breakthrough which would be disastrous for France. On the other, he believes that the Front National is so riven with internal contradictions - and personal hatreds - that it could rapidly deflate if it fails to make ground next year against the mainstream parties."In any European country this century, whenever a large part of the working class has gone to the far right - in Germany, Italy, Spain - you had a recipe for a fascist government..." he says.But the working classes, in France as elsewhere, are not what they were (only one in four of the French are now classed as "ouvriers", or workers). To win power in a modern democracy, you need the middle classes, where the Front National has, if anything, been losing ground."The problem," says de Saint Affrique, "is that the Front programme has become a kind of gag: utterly incoherent Capitalist and anti-capitalist Statist and anti-statist Welfarist and budget- cutting The present programme is non-applicable.