KEY POINTS:
France faces a momentous choice this week - and knows it.
In the calamitous presidential election of 2002, the country fell asleep at the wheel. It took little interest in the campaign and woke up after the first round of voting to find itself in a moral ditch.
The far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen sneaked into the second round five years ago partly because so many people failed to vote and partly because so many left-wing votes scattered to minor candidates.
This time the country is wide awake. Voting registration is up by more than 4 per cent. Interest in the campaign is high. France knows that this is a crossroads election.
A "new" generation of 50-something candidates promises to abandon the muddle of the past two decades and - finally - reconcile a divided, skittish, anxious nation with the menacing 21st century.
All those candidates - Nicolas Sarkozy on the centre-right, Segolene Royal on the centre-left, Francois Bayrou in the centre - are insiders running as outsiders. All promise to adopt a more pragmatic, non-ideological approach to France's problems of low growth and high state debt, low work-rate and high unemployment, high taxes and low competitiveness.
But none of them have fired the imagination of a country which desperately wanted to believe that a new democratic Messiah was at hand. The hungry Sarkozy scares people, even on the right. The dilettante Royal disappoints people, even on the left. The likeable Bayrou fails to galvanise people, even in the centre.
The opinion polls (which have been wrong before) suggest that Royal - after a shaky January and February - has stabilised in second position. The polls suggest that she and the clear front-runner, Sarkozy, will qualify next Sunday for the second round on May 6. The polls suggest that Sarkozy will then become the next President of the Republic, even though there is a clearly a growing wave of anti-Sarko feeling in the country.
Le Pen, at the age of 78, has not gone away. He is still as effective and as witty and as fluent and as loathsome and as poisonous as ever. He remains obsessed with the past and especially World War II.
If anyone is tempted to believe in the "kinder, gentler" Le Pen who began the campaign, they need to look only at the comments of "Le Chef" on radio yesterday.
He said that he "regretted" President Jacques Chirac's decision to recognise formally that the collaborationist French state had played a role in the extermination of Jews in 1940-44.
The opinion polls suggest that Le Pen will not reach the second round for a second time.
The opinion polls have been wrong - especially about Le Pen - before.
But France is a vast country. It is a disparate country and often a divided country.
The patterns of voting in national elections show sharp differences between north and south, east and west.
France is a country which has already changed - both for good and for ill - more than is generally admitted. It is a country which gets many things right; and other things badly wrong.
The French - aided and abetted by their presidential candidates - sometimes have difficulty in deciding which is which.
The country finds it hard to look at the "real" France of 2007, instead of the "virtual" France of its own imagination.
This "imagined" France is sometimes much blacker and more dismal than the hopeful reality.
In other cases, candidates peddle an idealised picture-book view of France, which barely exists.
- INDEPENDENT
