PROVINS, France—This is the terminus—the final stop of the P line of the Transilean. It begins at the swarming Gare de l’Est—Paris’s eastern train station where the long-haul TGVs speed eastward, the renowned EuroNight express making stops in Strasbourg, Berlin, Warsaw, Brest, Minsk and Moscow. On nearby tracks, swarms of commuters arrive in Paris each morning on the commuter lines of the Transilean and depart again each evening.
Provins is as far as you can get out of Paris—deep into territory where farms sprawl into the distance and towns become villages—before you drop off the edge of the French region known as the Île-de-France into La France Profonde. Deep France. There are 18 officially-designated régions in France. The Île-de-France is the most populous. Here, in the same région where you find the Champs-Elysées and the Boulevard Saint-Germain, you’ll find Provins.
There is one profound difference, at least politically, with Paris. Known as a département, within the région of the Île-de-France, Paris voted 85% to return President Emmanuel Macron to a second five-year term and gave Marine Le Pen, the far-right candidate of the Rassemblement Nationale, just 15%.
Out here in Provins, less than 90 minutes and 57 miles from Paris’s Hotel de Ville, it was much more of a horse race:
Here voters gave Macron 53% and Le Pen just 47%—barely a third of the 17% margin that Macron racked up nationwide to secure his second term. This is the yawning gap between the big cities of metropolitan France and the vast, but thinly-populated countryside of La France Profonde—demonstrating with stunning clarity the difference with the Electoral College system of the United States that is so profoundly unjust in expressing the views of all the people of a vast and disparate nation.
The results of the first round of voting in Paris was even more remarkable—best demonstrated in this chart from the official Ministry of the Interior tabulation:
Here, Macron and his far-left opponent Jean-Luc Mélenchon divided two-thirds of the vote nearly evenly between them. Not a single other candidate polled even in the double digits in Paris. And Le Pen? Sixth overall, outdistanced by the radical right firebrand Eric Zémmour and the Green party candidate Yannick Jadot. Valerie Pécresse, president of the entire Île-de-France region and carrying the banner of the Les Républicans party, which traces its origin to Charles de Gaulle and four of his successors, and Paris’s own mayor Anne Hidalgo, the candidate of Socialist Party which ruled France for 19 years under two presidents, between them were still mired in the single digits. Within minutes of these results, many began sounding the death knell of these two parties. But maybe not. Stand by.
First, let’s look at Provins where the results tell a far different story from that of Paris. Admittedly, these are very small numbers—fewer than 5,000 voters, two-thirds of everyone eligible to cast a ballot. But quite a difference from the preferences shown by the vast numbers who turned out in the center of Paris:
Here, it was Mélenchon in the lead with 23.4%, Le Pen barely point behind—all three dividing between them two-thirds of the outstanding vote. Pécresse, even here in a remote region of her home fiefdom could manage barely 11 percent.
And this is why I spent an hour and a half traveling out here to Provins, for a taste of the contrasts that mark the present and provide a sense of the future of the political life of a country and the forces at work that are shaping it. For French politics did not end by a long stretch on the Monday morning after the presidential elections. Now, the next and perhaps most vital stage has begun—Les Législatives, when the French go to the polls a second time, two months later (June 12 and 19) and choose those who will take the 577 seats in the French National Assembly. In the process, they will be deciding whether Macron’s last five years of his rule holds a realistic expectation of the profound changes he has promised or whether each initiative will require a day in-day out battle with a recalcitrant parliament where every vote will mean assembling a fractious and tenuous coalition of a host of minority forces.
As it happens, the political elite of Provins could pay a central role in any such case. As it has for decades. When I first covered French politics for CBS News back in the 1980s, when France had elected its first Socialist president since Léon Blum led the Front Populaire in the 1930s, the mayor of Provins and the power broker of the Île-de-France region was Alain Peyrefitte.
This was a remarkable man, who I came to know well—a product of this tiny farming village, which he served as its mayor for 32 years. A confidant of de Gaulle, he held seven different cabinet-level ministerial positions including Minister of Justice and Minister of Information where he established the rules of presidential debates that are still in force today. He was equally a brilliant scholar and author, elected to the Académie Française as one of the 40 Immortels. His tomb lies near that of Napoléon in the Invalides.
Today, his successor as mayor is Olivier Lavenka, a somewhat undistinguished local functionary but an utterly loyal acolyte of the powerful local political godfather Christian Jacob, who began his career as an exploitant agricole, or farm manager, and rose to leader of Les Républicains—the party of Peyrefitte, not to mention de Gaulle, Georges Pompidou, Valérie Giscard d’Estaing, Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy. But Jacob’s power extends far beyond his local village hall. He is also the leader of Les Républicains in the National Assembly, with 103 members the second largest group after Macron’s ruling La République en Marche with 268.
Jacob rarely speaks to any journalists apart from those of Le Figaro, the center-right paper that even today is the effective house organ of Les Républicans, or at least what’s left of this party. He has defined himself as a Chiraquien rather than a Gaullist, but more recently has settled on “Bonapartist” or follower of Napoleon Bonaparte. Which might appear to place him firmly in the first decades of the 19th century.
Given his importance in the future life of this nation, and the potential survival of one of France’s long-time leading parties, I thought it would be interesting to speak with some of his constituents. Which is what really brought me here to Provins.
Provins relies heavily on tourism. Indeed, it is divided neatly into the lower town where the village hall and town center are situated and the upper town where a medieval village is still faithfully preserved with tower, ramparts and even the church where Joan of Arc visited for a mass with King Charles VII back on August 3, 1429.
Upper and lower villages, connected by a very steep road (and no public transport) each has it own upper and lower schools, village square and innumerable eateries. Between the two are a host of stone houses, including one where the Vatelots, father and son, served as world-renowned “master lute-makers.”
We selected for lunch Au Marrionnier (At the Chestnut) whose host, Jean-Michel, served up a quite delicious croque monsieur, charcuterie platter and fresh green salad, not to mention some most interesting political commentary.
Five years ago, he broke with local tradition in the heart of Republican territory, and voted in both first and second rounds for Macron who soundly defeated in the first round the Republican candidate François Fillon, a nonentity, as well as Le Pen. “I wanted change,” Jean-Michel shrugged with a degree of embarrassment since in his view, Macron simply hadn’t delivered, at least in his view, the kind of change that had been promised. This time, he observed, “Macron was not to my taste.” So he voted in the first round for the one individual that was Macron’s all but utter antithesis—Le Pen. He paused, so I asked, “and in the second round this time?” He looked a bit sheepish. “Nul,” he said, “I voted nul.”
Nul is an interesting alternative in France that allows an expression of utter disgust with just about everybody and everything. All French voting is done by paper ballots—voters taking pieces of paper, each with the name of one candidate, placing their choice inside an envelope and dropping it into the ballot box. At the end of the day, the envelopes are opened, the votes tallied. But it is also possible to put a blank piece of paper into the envelope, which is then registered as “blanc.” Or they can place in the box an empty envelope, which is counted as “nul.” The individual will have done his patriotic duty as a citizen and voted—but for no one.
So why did Jean-Michel vote “nul”? He just could not in the end imagine putting a Le Pen in charge of his beloved country—she did not represent the values he believed France should stand for. But what about Valérie Pécresse, the Republican candidate, leader of his own region and supported by his mayor and Christian Jacob. “Insolite,” he sniffed. “She is insolite.”
Which pretty much summed it up. And suggests several things. First, is one principle I believe has held since the first campaign I covered when Marine Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie, was on the ballot. A majority of the French people just can’t bring themselves to place their beloved ‘patrie’ in the hands of someone—indeed a family—which represents so many ideas antithetical to their view of French democracy, their way of life.
But one question remains. Are the French still prepared to give Emmanuel Macron the ability to continue for five more years, all but unchecked, by presenting him with an unrestrained majority in their parliament two months from now?
Watch this space.
Vive la France.