Ever since he founded the National Front (FN) in 1972, Mr Jean-Marie Le Pen has won converts to his extreme right-wing party by scaremongering. A long list of enemies, he claimed, threatened France: communists, Jews, Freemasons, Arabs, blacks, Brussels bureaucrats, US imperialism, globalisation . . . Mr Le Pen offered a simple solution to the complex problems of unemployment and crime - deport all immigrants.
Over the past decade, nearly 15 per cent of the French electorate has consistently subscribed to this hate-filled ideology. FN voters are a notoriously disparate group, encompassing fundamentalist Catholics, monarchist aristocrats, veterans of the Algerian war and pieds noirs, working-class former communists and neo-Nazis. They share anger, fear, dissatisfaction and disgust at "corrupt" politicians.
The FN's strength has taken it to the second, final round in most recent French elections. These triangular contests siphoned off votes from the traditional right, which was presented with the dilemma of striking deals with the FN devil or standing back while the left won. The FN appeared indestructible. Then, in 10 days this month, the party lost the ground slowly conquered by Mr Le Pen over 27 years. This time the enemy came from within, in the form of Mr Le Pen's own deputy and Delegate General, Mr Bruno Megret. The pitbull fight between them is not about ideology - they share the same views and now accuse one another of being racist and extremist. The vicious struggle between the 70-year-old Le Pen and his 49-year-old challenger is solely about power. The division of the FN into opposing camps is arguably the most important political event in France this year.
The FN's ageing demagogue unleashed his fury at a December 11th dinner for 700 militants in the city of Metz. Spitting, sweating and pacing the stage in his usual manner, Mr Le Pen repeated twice that France was in danger. "Within the very heart of the National Front" a handful of "feverish, ambitious men, manipulated and helped from the outside" were trying to destroy his "great movement of resistance".
The subversion to which Mr Le Pen referred was Mr Megret's demand for an extraordinary congress of the FN at which egret hopes he hoped to unseat Mr Le Pen as president. Like the fascists of Mussolini's Italy, Mr Le Pen likes making allusions to ancient Rome. He was different from Caesar, he said. "When Brutus came towards him brandishing a knife, Caesar pulled his toga over his head whereas I pull out my sword and I kill Brutus before he kills me."
The murderous imagery shocked even the FN audience. While some applauded, others exchanged uncomfortable looks. Three Megret supporters stood up and left the banqueting hall, pursued by dozens of Le Pen loyalists shouting "Treason! Treason!" Since the Metz speech, newspapers refer to the feuding FN leaders simply as Caesar and Brutus. Mr Le Pen has also called Mr Megret "the termite" because of the way he worked his way through the party faithful. Lepenistes also mock him as "nabot-leon" - a joke on his small stature (nabot means dwarf) and admiration for Napoleon.
Recent French history abounds with personality clashes within parties - Francois Mitterrand and Michel Rocard, Jacques Chirac and Edouard Balladur - but never has the public been treated to such raw hatred. On Monday, bailiffs had to separate Le Pen and Megret supporters outside the party's headquarters, from which the megretistes were expelled after they allegedly stole computer records. Evisceration is a recurring theme. Mr Le Pen compares himself to a matador "who was supposed to be gored by the bulls of Mr Megret". The humourless but well educated Mr Megret casts their mutual loathing in more intellectual terms. "It's not a question of committing patricide," he says, "but of preventing infanticide by Le Pen against his own party."
The Megret clan accuses Mr Le Pen of nepotism, of creating bad publicity by reiterating his claim that the Nazi gas chambers were a "detail" of history and by attacking a woman socialist candidate during the 1997 legislative election.
Mr Le Pen was campaigning for his eldest daughter, Marie-Caroline, when he assaulted her rival during a shouting match. A court found him ineligible for public office over the incident. So Mr Le Pen announced his wife Jany would lead the FN list in next June's European election. That brought Mr Megret out of the woodwork - he denounced the choice of Mrs Le Pen - and the purge of Megret supporters started. Because the court's decision was altered on appeal, Mr Le Pen will now stand in the election after all.
Mr Le Pen's son-in-law, Samuel Marechal, the leader of the FN youth group, and his youngest daughter, Marine, the party's legal adviser, are among his most stalwart defenders. But Marie-Caroline - the pretty blonde whose political ambitions set the chain reaction in motion - sided with her companion, a Megret lieutenant named Philippe Olivier. "I'm used to family treachery," Mr Le Pen shrugged on a television broadcast. "My daughter is mixed up with a leader of the sedition. The laws of nature have always inclined daughters towards their husband or their lover rather than their father."
THE divorce between FN factions is now all but final. Mr Le Pen has suspended seven high-ranking members who refuse to attend a disciplinary meeting on December 23rd and Mr Megret's group has set up its own headquarters. The megretistes plan to hold their congress on January 24th. In the meantime, a bailiff is sorting the FN's mail into two piles and the legal battle for the party's name, its symbol of a red, white and blue tricolour flame and especially its money, has begun. French laws on the public financing of political parties gave the FN nearly £4.3 million last year and its elected officials were required to contribute another £1.17 million to party coffers.
Three small, right-of-centre parties are circling like vultures in the hope of attracting FN voters. The two main right-wing parties, the Gaullist RPR and the UDF, are delighted that Mr Le Pen can no longer sap their strength in three-way contests. "The boil has been lanced," Le Figaro announced triumphantly. "We are entering the post-Le Pen era." For his part, Prime Minister Jospin called the disintegration of the FN "good news for democracy" and claimed, dubiously, that his leftwing government's policies had blocked its rise.
For 10 years, Mr Megret has built up the FN party apparatus and as of December 16th, 63 of 102 FN federations had sided with him, 27 with Mr Le Pen and 12 were undecided. But if the party bureaucrats like Mr Megret's strategy of alliances with other right-wing parties, the rank and file prefer Mr Le Pen's attitude of solitary defiance and perpetual victimhood. For them, he will always be The Leader.
Mr Le Pen claimed the FN would win 20 per cent of the vote in the June 1999 European elections. There will now be two FN lists and those hopes are dashed. In the first post-split poll of FN voters, published by the Nouvel Observateur on December 17th, 31 per cent said they would vote for Mr Le Pen's list, 16 per cent for Mr Megret's. Fortyone per cent said they would move to other parties, while 12 per cent said they would abstain. In other words, Mr Le Pen's rump-FN may get about 5 per cent of the vote - a fitting decline and fall for the man who thinks he is Caesar.
