Bulldog spirit seizes on power of a siege mentality

IT WAS here, in the City of Europe, that the French National Front (FN) leader, Mr Jean Marie Le Pen, unleashed his fiercest diatribe against European integration.

In his closing address at the FN's congress yesterday, Mr Le Pen promised to renounce the Maastricht treaty, European Monetary Union and the Schengen agreement on free movement within the EU if he ever came to power.

The French electorate has one year to decide whether they want to follow Mr Le Pen in his Eurocidal zeal if the FN wins 20 or more seats in the French parliament, it could seriously hamper French participation in Europe.

The grande alternative which the FN was proposing would be nationalist, Mr Le Pen said. "It will mean the abandonment of globalisation and federalism, the denunciation of the treaties of Maastricht and Schengen, the maintenance of our national currency and the supremacy of French laws over foreign laws."

He claimed that 40 per cent of French laws now originate in Brussels.

With his protruding lower lip and heavy chin, Mr Le Pen bears a strong resemblance to a bulldog, which his manner confirms. He used the words "diarrhetic" and "flatulence" to describe France's mainstream politicians.

"Victory comes only to those who have enemies, and we have enemies," he told a rapt audience of some 3,000, where the average age appeared to be about 55.

As is his habit, Mr Le Pen borrowed indiscriminately from the very people he condemns. Using the late Francois Mitterrand's first presidential campaign slogan, he said that the FN represented "quiet strength".

While he pilloried the US, he repeated - without attribution - the American founding fathers' desideratum of government "of the people, by the people and for the people".

With words that will rankle in President Jacques Chirac's Gaullist movement, Mr Le Pen went so far as to compare himself to Gen Charles de Gaulle, who founded his own party in Strasbourg 50 years ago this month.

Mr Le Pen attacked his usual bugbears immigrants, the "plot" of globalisation, the New World Order, the Establishment, masonic lodges, the "shady dictatorship of intellectuals", the media. All were trying to "stop the irresistible rise of the National Front".

France's ruling class suffered from "mental AIDS", he said. "Never before today was France so threatened in its very existence." The French government was destroying the country's armed forces, which it had "put at the service of a global government".

This was a sinister betrayal summed up by the attitude that "France is dying, let's not trouble her in her agony".

To hear Mr Le Pen speak, he and his followers are the only true patriots in France, the only defenders of the nation, the fatherland. Globalisation is the "doctrine of global government, the sworn enemy of nations and of patriots, the destroyer of our borders that leaves our economy exposed to unfair competition".

The European Year Against Racism, which was declared at the Council of Europe even as Mr Le Pen delivered his speech, was "moral and financial crookery".