LETTER FROM FRANCE/Lara Marlowe: The ticket-seller at the train station wasn't born when striking workers at the Dunlop tyre factory pelted President de Gaulle with tomatoes in 1959. But the incident entered local folk memory. "De Gaulle was so angry that he crossed Montluçon off with red ink," she tells me.
"He said he'd never come back here, that he'd never help this town. People are superstitious; they say that's why unemployment is so high." At 12 per cent, joblessness in Montluçon is nearly four points above the national average.
The town had a population of 65,000 then, and Daniel Dugléry was a schoolboy. "Our population was supposed to reach 100,000 by 2000," he recalls. "Instead, we lost 15,000 jobs and 20,000 people." Mr Dugléry blames Pierre Goldberg, the communist who was elected mayor in 1977, for the decline of this industrial town at the geographic centre of France. After 24 years "under the communist boot" - Mr Dugléry's words - the Gaullist official won the town hall for the right in last year's "blue wave" municipal elections.
During a 30-year absence from his home town, Mr Dugléry rose through the ranks of the French police, becoming Inspector General, with 80,000 police under his orders.
Today, the new mayor hopes President Jacques Chirac will be re-elected, and he intends to take Mr Goldberg's National Assembly seat in the June election.
After the first round of the presidential poll on Sunday, Mr Dugléry will record a video-cassette about crime, to help Mr Chirac for the second round on May 5th. The broadcast will strengthen rumours that Mr Dugléry could be appointed to the new position of minister for security if the right wins the assembly.
The animosity between the Gaullist mayor and the communist deputy is as intense as that between Mr Chirac and the Prime Minister, Mr Lionel Jospin - and shows that in France, the chasm between left and right survived the end of the Cold War. Mr Dugléry calls Mr Goldberg an "irresponsible illusionist and demagogue" and accuses him of financial corruption. Mr Goldberg calls Mr Dugléry "a stooge of economic liberalism" and claims he has extreme right-wing sympathies. They even dress for the parts.
Mr Dugléry (56) smokes cigars and wears a white shirt, silk tie and double-breasted suit with his Legion of Honour stuck in the lapel. Mr Goldberg (64) receives me in the ground floor office of a pre-fabricated high-rise building, dressed in baggy jeans, a khaki shirt and sports shoes.
Mr Dugléry paints a catastrophic picture of the police and justice system nationwide, but the problem in Montluçon, he says, is employment - despite a strategic location at the cross-roads of north-south and east-west highways, "factories in the country" and a highly trained and loyal work force. "In Montluçon, you're hired by a company, you spend your life there, and you die there," he explains. He's proud that the Saint Jacques factory manufactured cannons for two world wars, that Montluçon foundaries make the bodies of Ferrari cars.
The curse of Montluçon, the mayor says, are "a handful of madmen" in the communist party and the communist trade union CGT - the same lot who harassed Mr Dugléry's hero Gen de Gaulle back in 1959.
"They're waiting for the great day when the workers of the world unite," he says dismissively. "My success [in the municipal election] last year and [in the upcoming election] in June comes from denouncing the stupid, nasty behaviour of the CGT, which tries to block everything. People here understand about globalisation." He quotes the German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, saying that Mr Jospin's law on the 35-hour working week was great news for Germany. "The government doesn't have the right to prevent people from working," Mr Dugléry complains.
Nonsense, replies Mr Goldberg. The Auvergne region is home to two of the world's three tyre manufacturers - Michelin and Goodyear-Dunlop - and it is in economic crisis "because big international groups are wrecking the economy". Goodyear-Dunlop has reduced staff from 1300 to 800. A Siemens electronics factory fired 600 of its 800 employees, Mr Goldberg says Michelin, 90 km away in Clermont-Ferrand, shed 15,000 jobs in three decades. "They don't give a damn if there's a communist mayor. Unemployment in Montluçon has risen 3.9 per cent since Mr Dugléry was elected, but I know better than to blame it on a right-wing mayor."
Mr Dugléry admits that "the problem for our presidential candidates is finding things to disagree on". The biggest difference between left and right is on economic policy; the choice between plunging the country into the cut-throat fray of global competition, or trying to brake capitalism's nefarious effects on the good life in France through - Mr Jospin's favourite word - regulation.
It is a fundamental dilemma, but one politicians have not explained clearly. Five days before the election, 40 per cent of French voters are undecided, and more than a third are expected to abstain. How, one wonders, did one of the world's finest democracies reach such depths of disaffection? Angelique (19), Andrea (20) and Brice (21) sat outside Le Bar Moderne in the main street of Montluçon. The three friends are part-time hotel and restaurant workers, and none was sure to vote on Sunday.
"We avoid talking about politics," Andrea said. "It puts us in a bad mood. When I see candidates on television, I zap to another channel. They promise anything and everything, and they never deliver. They're incapable of giving straight answers." I heard the same refrain from young and old, middle class and poor.
No one cited the multitude of corruption scandals; what hurt was that a man's word no longer meant anything. Older residents, like Yvette (64), said they would fulfil their civic duty. "I'll go to the polling station on Sunday", she said, "but I have no idea who to vote for."
The French are being asked to vote four times between April 21st and June 16th. But if the sense of futility and broken trust I found in Montluçon - far worse than mere indifference - is any indication, it will be easier to win office than to heal the body politic.