KEY POINTS:
PARIS - The drive from La Courneuve to the 17th arrondissement of Paris takes eight minutes. In those eight minutes, you travel a thousand light-years.
In both places yesterday, polling stations had been set up in primary schools. In both places, the voters chose from piles of slips of paper pre-printed with the 12 candidates' names.
In both places, the electors retired behind the same kind of flimsy, grey curtains in the same kind of portable voting booths. They placed the name of their chosen candidate in the same sky-blue envelopes, marked "Republique Francaise".
After that, the resemblance ended.
France is one "indivisible" republic, according to its constitution. La Courneuve and the wealthy quartiers of Paris are divided by the visible barrier of the Boulevard Peripherique and by less visible barriers of wealth, suspicion, fear, race - and politics.
La Courneuve is, by reputation, one of the toughest, poorest and most inflammable of the multiracial suburbs that surround Paris.
Polling station number 9 had been set up in the Langevin-Wallon primary school.
All around were shabby, peeling tower blocks, built in the 1970s. At intervals there were islands of prim, suburban houses, built in the 1950s, in the style of miniature chateaux.
Almost everyone I spoke to - maybe 20 people of a multiplicity of races - told me they had voted for Segolene Royal. There was one vote each for Nicolas Sarkozy, Francois Bayrou and Jean-Marie Le Pen.
By mid-morning, there was a long, patient queue - women in Islamic headscarves, men in skull-caps, young men in baseball hats, prim, middle-aged white couples - to place votes in the official urn.
One of the polling station workers said he had "never seen such a high turn-out in La Courneuve".
Official figures showed a 10 per cent increase in voting by midday across the country and still higher in the Paris suburbs.
Many of the Royal supporters in La Courneuve were not really Royal supporters. They preferred more radical left-wing candidates. They said they had decided, sometimes just before voting, to vote Royal, "to form a bloc" against Sarkozy or Le Pen.
Georgette, 64, from the French West Indies, said that, "in her heart", she preferred the anti-globalist Jose Bove. "I had to vote for Sego to stop Sarkozy, who would set this place alight."
One of the few dissenting voices in the pro-Sego parade was Marie, 70, a jovial woman with grey hair, who resembled everyone's favourite aunt.
Whom did she vote for? "Le Pen. Because there are too many foreigners around here. We are no longer at home, the French, I mean."
Polling station number 48 in the 17th arrondissement of Paris was in a primary school, five minutes' walk from the Champs Elysees and the Etoile. The surrounding streets are crammed with early 20th century, art nouveau apartment blocks where the rents go as high as €3300 ($6000) a month, nearly three times the minimum French monthly wage.
Every person I spoke to here had voted for Sarkozy.
Some were previously Le Pen supporters. Some, "scared" of what a President Sarkozy might bring, had been tempted by the Bayrou centrist option. All said they had decided in the end to vote Sarkozy.
Not one had been remotely tempted to vote Royal, even one middle-aged woman who said she had voted for Socialist candidates in the past.
In the end it was a tale of two cities and two countries. At least two.
- INDEPENDENT
