FRANCE: Lara Marlowe, in Marseille, investigates what really motivates the National Front candidate
France's presidential candidates, Mr Jacques Chirac and Mr Jean-Marie Le Pen, were to hold their last campaign rallies before Sunday's election last night.
Mr Chirac chose the Villepinte convention centre near Roissy airport, Mr Le Pen the Palais des Sports in Marseille.
Mr Le Pen has held his tongue throughout the campaign. Though he heaped abuse on Mr Chirac and shouted at journalists, there's been not a hint of the offensive remarks that made him a political pariah.
Fortunately, France's only investigative newspaper, Le Canard enchaîné, published a selection of Mr Le Pen's bons mots this week.
"I'm not excited about the idea of Arabs jumping the girls of Strasbourg," the extreme right-wing candidate told Playboy in 1987. "I eat raw Muslims for breakfast, since it's not forbidden by the Prophet," Mr Le Pen joked in his official biography, published in 1984.
"Yes, I believe in the inequality of races. It's a banal thing to say," he declared on Europe 1 in September 1996.
Five days later, he added on RTL, "They don't have the same abilities, nor the same level of historic evolution."
The Austrian populist leader, Mr Jörg Haider, told Profil magazine this week that he would like to unite the extreme right for the 2004 European elections, but without Mr Le Pen's National Front, because Mr Le Pen "has racist positions in his programme".
Mr Le Pen's reputation for anti-Semitism is based on crude statements about crematoriums and gas chambers. Going back to February 1958, when Mr Le Pen was a deputy in the National Assembly, he attacked the Jewish prime minister Pierre Mendès France, saying: "You are aware that you crystalise on your person a certain number of patriotic, almost physical repulsions!" The right and extreme right applauded.
From the left-wing benches came cries of "Racist! Racist!" Mr Le Pen often cites opinion polls showing that 73 per cent of the French say integrity is the quality they most desire in a president. "No one can reproach me anything on that level," he boasts.
He mocks Mr Chirac for owning a chateau in Corrèze, and tells followers he was so poor that he walked barefoot to school in Brittany.
Yet Mr Le Pen's income tax declaration showed him to be the richest of 16 candidates in the first round. And he may have cheated; Capital magazine reported recently that Montretout, the manor house he owns in St Cloud, overlooking Paris, is worth twice the €1.6 million he declared.
Mr Le Pen inherited it from the millionaire cement factory owner Hubert Lambert in 1976, after promising to make Lambert, a senile alcoholic, minister of the interior in his post coup d'état government.
The tactic was so successful that Le Pen made a practice of cultivating moribund rich people. In 1985, Julien Le Sabazec also left his estate to Le Pen, on the understanding he would look after the family tomb. Seventeen years later, it is still untended.
While National Front minions slave away in a cold, leaking building they call "le Paquebot" (the ocean liner), Mr Le Pen takes €3,035 from party coffers each month as rent for his office in Montretout manor.
The Le Pens do not live there, but in a sprawling villa in Rueil-Malmaison, with swimming pool, grounds and an apartment for Mr Le Pen's bodyguard.
The former husband of Mr Le Pen's second wife Jany was a supporter who paid the couple's rent for years. When he stopped, the landlord attempted to expel Jean-Marie and Jany, and is now suing them.
In the list of invectives levelled against Mr Le Pen, "sexist" is often forgotten. In an interview with Le Parisien in 1996, he said: "The idea that your body belongs to you is completely laughable. It belongs to life and also, in part, to the nation." Mr Le Pen called his first wife Pierrette "the bitch of Montretout".
The German tabloid Bild this week republished a Playboy photograph of Pierrette doing housework, topless.
Mr Le Pen uses the family as an analogy for the French nation. He explains his hostility towards immigrants, saying: "I prefer my daughters to my nieces, my nieces to my cousins, my cousins to my neighbours, and my neighbours to strangers."
Yet all is not happy in the Le Pen household. His eldest daughter, Marie-Caroline, has not spoken to her father since she defected with her husband and other "felons" to Bruno Mégret's MNR in 1998. "I don't understand; I did everything for that girl," Mr Le Pen told The Irish Times on April 18th. "I sent her to study in London and at Harvard. I put her feet in the stirrups, and this is how she thanked me."
Since Mr Le Pen's success in the April 21st first round, both ex-wife Pierrette and estranged daughter Marie-Caroline have reportedly sent him congratulations.
Also on April 18th, Mr Le Pen told me he had successfully sued the publications that reported he had tortured in Algeria. Not quite true, it turns out. Le Canard enchaîné was cleared of defaming Mr Le Pen after a long legal battle. So was the former socialist prime minister, Mr Michel Rocard.
The newspaper Combat, dated November 9th, 1962, quoted Mr Le Pen: "I have nothing to hide. I tortured because it had to be done. When they bring you someone who has just planted 20 bombs . . . and he doesn't want to talk, you have to use exceptional means to make him." The following day, Mr Le Pen said he preferred the words "methods of constraint" to "torture". In the National Assembly he boasted of having been an intelligence officer with a job regarded by some as "a mix between an SS officer and an agent of the Gestapo".
Twelve years later, when Mr Le Pen stood for the European Parliament, he denied his own previous statements. He dismissed the four Algerians who testified against him as "terrorists and liars".