New York
When Jean-Marie Le Pen democratically won the right to challenge the incumbent Jacques Chirac for the presidency in 2002, I wrote in this here space that happiness was to wake up and find Le Pen president of France. By the reaction I had, you’d think I had prayed for Mao, Stalin, Hitler and Pol Pot — I list them in order of the numbers they killed — to have landed the top job in the land of cheese. Three years later, the chickens are coming home to roost, as they say in Clermont Ferrand.
Paris is burning, or rather French cars are burning, and the people that Le Pen warned against a long time ago are burning them. Sir Oswald Mosley and the great Enoch Powell must be enjoying the joke. St Denis is far away from the chestnut trees and the cobblestone streets of the chic Left Bank, and the café terraces where trendy lefties sat during the 1968 riots and watched the CRS baton-charge the protesters while lovers could still smooch on the banks of the Seine, but young Arabs ain’t the CRS.
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