FRANCE: Football fever unites France but also highlights disillusionment, writes Lara Marlowe in Paris
Belief in miracles does not come easily to the French, but the past two weeks, during which the national football team, Les Bleus, won three matches to qualify for the World Cup final against Italy tomorrow have softened the most cynical Gallic hearts.
The joy is all the greater for the team's earlier poor performance. Their coach, Raymond Domenech, was booed during training sessions.
France found it difficult to believe in its team, the oldest in the competition.
Three star athletes, the captain Zinédine Zidane (34), Lilian Thuram (34) and Claude Makelele (33) had already retired from international competition. The German newspaper Bild called them "a team of grand-pas".
Now their unexpected success has become a paradigm for an ageing country on an ageing continent, proof that experience matters, that older can be better.
In less than two weeks, "blue fever" has swept the country.
Motorists attach tricolours to car antennae. Waiters and shop-keepers wear football jerseys. Adidas has sold 500,000 of the official shirts, and is waiting for tomorrow night's results to print a new batch bearing two stars for two World Cup victories.
Half-a-million people crowded onto the Champs-Élysées when France beat Portugal on July 5th. More than one million are expected in the event of victory tomorrow.
Parisians bid farewell to each other with the exhortation: "Allez les Bleus!"
The same cheer is printed on a huge banner in front of the National Assembly.
The capital's wrought-iron balconies are adorned with home-made versions of the banner, as well as posters of Zidane. The French postal service has printed a commemorative stamp saying "Merci les Bleus!"
If France wins, Zidane, long the most popular person in the country, will attain something approaching apotheosis.
The mood was captured by a cartoon in yesterday's Courrier Picard newspaper, showing a Frenchman kneeling before Zidane.
"To think that two weeks ago I was still an atheist!" the man says. "God, forgive me."
After the match, Zidane will retire, do charity work and go with his father Smail to his parents' home town of Bejaia, on the Kabyle coast of Algeria.
Millions of French people would prefer he became president of their rudderless country. But the shy, modest man with a Marseille accent and the grace of a dancer has shown no interest in politics.
Tomorrow's final is Zidane's chance to go out in a blaze of glory, to join the Brazilian Pelé in the firmament of the greatest football players of all time.
Despite the euphoria, this summer's "blue fever" is a mutant of the 1998 variety, when France won the World Cup for the first time.
Then, the description of the team as "black, blanc, beur" (black, white and Arab) was seen as a metaphor for French society, and a promise of greater equality in the future.
Now there is only disillusion.
Eight years later, France's minorities are still locked in the banlieues - ghettos around big cities, where the only hope of escape is to become a football star.
The racist, extreme right-wing leader Jean-Marie Le Pen made it to the run-off in the 2002 presidential election.
Last November, the country was badly shaken by three weeks of race riots.
The French team have warned Nicolas Sarkozy, the interior minister and right-wing presidential candidate, that they don't want to see him in the locker room if they win tomorrow.
Sarkozy was criticised by Lilian Thuram, who is from the West Indies, for referring to young delinquents in the banlieues as "scum".
A much-noticed banner carried down the Champs-Élysées on July 5th said: "The scum are going to bring the Cup back: isn't that magnificent!"
Now, each time large numbers of French people go into the streets, there are repeats of last November's violence.
Football victories are celebrated with honking horns, fire-crackers and impromptu renditions of the Marseillaise, but also with vandalism, looting and attacks on police and party-goers.
On July 5th, in Montpéllier, a 24-year-old was fatally stabbed in the neck near a giant screen.
Police used tear-gas on the Champs-Élysées that same night, when 350 young men were arrested and 45 police were injured country-wide.
Sarkozy yesterday ordered the police and gendarmerie to deploy an extra 4,000 men for the World Cup final and Bastille Day festivities, "so that a popular, symbolic celebration not be spoiled by a minority of delinquents".