Evelyne Marcelot, 71, worked for 46 years as a secretary at the Villeroy & Boch ceramic factory in Nangis, in the Seine-et-Marne department east of Paris, in its heyday, before competition from low-wage countries led to its closure. She then went on to set up a personal service mini-business. She deeply enjoyed living in La Ferté-Gaucher, further north from Nangis, a quiet town with a population of 4,800, where she was an elected member of the municipal council for several years.

But she doesn’t like her town anymore, has had her house up for sale for many months without success, and is considering fleeing Nangis too. “Because the population has changed.” Too many immigrants. Too many veiled women. Too many lost causes, according to her. The Les Républicains (LR, conservative) voter, a Gaullist at heart, will be voting for the far-right Rassemblement National (RN) party in the parliamentary elections. To “turn things around” among the elites so that “things change in the country.” LR leader Eric Ciotti, who made a disputed deal with the RN for the upcoming elections “is right, but he’s being bludgeoned so much. The RN too. They have to understand that the more they trash them, the more it makes us want the RN!” Marcelot dreams of radical change, just as the left had after May 1981 and the election of the first Socialist president, François Mitterrand. And, as in those days, nothing seems more mobilizing to her than talk of blocking the far right, threats of chaos and fear.

There’s an air of revenge, a desire for victory that’s not just electoral, but also based on identity and culture, in the words of right-wing and far-right voters in the fourth constituency of Seine-et-Marne, where Jordan Bardella’s list won 47.5% of the vote in the European elections. It’s a slow sedimentation of disappointment, anger and misunderstanding of what French society has become. So much so that in this department of 1.4 million residents, a historic stronghold of political barons, the right is now in danger of disappearing from the benches of the Assemblée Nationale.

There’s an air of revenge, then. Just as there remains a part of the US for which Trump was robbed of his victory in 2020, there exists a France for which François Fillon was unfairly eliminated from the 2017 presidential election, the first act of the slow decomposition of the French right. “Fillon should have become president in 2017, it made sense, it was the true right, but he was prevented,” said Evelyne Marcelot. During the 2017 presidential campaign, Fillon was accused of illegally hiring his wife as a member of his staff when he was an MP. He was eventually for embezzlement of public funds, complicity and concealment of misuse of social assets.

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