Mayhem in the streets as Le Pen preaches

DON'T be afraid of the National Front. That's what Jean-Marie Le Pen told adoring followers at the group's 10th party congress.

The front was there to protect them - from "the migratory subversion of the third world" which was swamping France with peoples of different races, customs and religions, from "the terrifying, mortal threat" of globalism and European integration that was poised to sweep over the continent "and destroy our identity".

The frontline in Mr Le Pen's war for French purity was just a few hundred metres away, where the Avenue de La Paix feeds into the Place Bordeaux. While 50 000 anti Le Pen demonstrators from all over Europe peacefully made their way through Strasbourg, a small group split off to confront the riot police protecting Mr Le Pen's congress.

"Down with the Front, Down with the Front," the group chanted. Some waved the red and black flags of the German anarchist movement "Raus Nazi". A young man with long hair pried a paving stone loose and hurled it over the plexi glass shields of the police. Others followed his example.

The police threw the pavingstones back, then came the tear gas canisters. As the police charged, the demonstrators fled pausing to smash six plate glass windows at the Sofinco bank.

Later on Saturday evening demonstrators milled around the city's main square, the Place Kleber, drinking beer and listening to a free rock concert. "Beer rock music and no police - there is going to be trouble," a cinema manager who had marched in the demonstration predicted.

Twenty one shop windows were broken on the Place Kleber three bus shelters were destroyed and a police car was set on fire. Forty young people were arrested. "It's more fun when it gets rough," a teenager from the Paris suburb of Aubervilliers told me. "We have to break things or nobody pays attention. The government is no better than Le Pen."

The Place de Broglie was eerily alight with bonfires and vibrated to the sound of African drums. A solitary young man, his face hidden by the hood of his anorak, attacked the graceful 19th century Hotel de Ville with a slingshot, taking out one window pane at a time.

Back in the Avenue de La Paix, scene of the earlier police charge, an Algerian boy of no more than 15 raked a wooden pole along the front of buildings, the glass tinkling in his wake. He joined up with a dozen older boys, all North Africans, who had shaved their heads like their enemies in the neo Nazi skinheads.

Jean Marie Le Pen wanted this violence. He predicted it and gloried in it when his congress resumed yesterday morning. Didn't it justify his disdain for the "professional anti racists" who organised the demonstrations? The incidents were much more serious than the media had let on, he told the standing room only crowd in the Palais des Congres. The shopkeepers and taxpayers would have to pay for the damage, whereas the bill ought to be delivered directly to "Cathy the Red", as Mr Le Pen calls Ms Catherine Trautmann, Strasbourg's Socialist mayor and one of the chief organisers of the anti FN weekend.

The FN leader went through a long list of wrongs, ill or imagined, to his party. Why, they were treated just as badly as the Jews were treated by Hitler, he said an audacious claim from a man who has questioned whether the Holocaust ever occurred.

The FN's "Department of International Relations" invited rightwingers of dubious repute from 10 European countries. The Serb nationalist leader, Vojislav Seselj - wanted as a war criminal for some of the worst massacres of Bosnian Muslims - sent fraternal greetings because the French Foreign Ministry wouldn't give him a visa. Anti Muslim causes were crowdpleasers; a right wing leader from Greece got a standing ovation when he said that Turkish Islamists threaten Greece just as Muslims threaten France.

France has become the standard bearer for right wing nationalists in Europe, a proponent of Greater Romania told the audience.

"Perhaps the greatest event of this congress is that a union of European patriots is being born here," Mr Le Pen said. He'd even chosen a name for his co operative of the extreme right; while the frightened city of Strasbourg played dead outside, "Euronat" was born yesterday in the Palais des Congres.