Many hundreds of thousands were on the streets of France's cities within hours of hearing that the second-round run-off of their presidential election, on 5 May, would give them a choice between the fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen and the corrupt right-wing Tory Jacques Chirac.
Behind those hundreds of thousands stand three million people who voted for the three Trotskyist candidates in the presidential first round - Arlette Laguiller (1.6 million), Olivier Besancenot (1.2 million), and Daniel Gluckstein (0.1 million).
The demonstrators are mostly young, whereas Le Pen's voters are disproportionately elderly. The demonstrators and the three million voters know what they are for, or at least some broad outlines of it: equality, freedom, jobs for all, public services for all, social control of social wealth. Most Le Pen voters are soured, baffled, demoralised, knowing no answer but to want a "strong hand" to deal with the social decay they see around them.
The demonstrators and the three million have powerful organisations - hobbled by cowardly, wretched and bureaucratic leadership, but still strong - in the trade unions and a host of community associations and campaigns. Less than seven years ago, in late 1995, the trade unions were able to shake the country with the biggest strike wave since 1968. Le Pen's fascists have no such organisation. In 1995 their appeals to break the strikes made no impact.
Le Pen's election success is an historic warning bell. But, as the French Marxist weekly Liaisons puts it, the radical left vote "is also historic, and maybe more so - it depends on us".
Le Pen's 16.9% vote will boost the racists and fascists immensely. It puts them in pole position to conscript the demoralised in a bid for power should a great economic crisis come - and that is not a far-fetched possibility. Immediately, it gives them political leverage to tilt the whole spectrum of mainstream French politics to the right, around their chosen themes: death penalty, more prisons, scapegoating of immigrants. These dangers can be combatted. But they are large.
Why did it happen? The French people have not suddenly gone fascist. If the maverick Philippe de Villiers is included in the "far right" total of the last presidential election, 1995, then the total "far right" vote went down slightly between 1995 and 2002 (20.5% to 19.2%). The total "right-wing" vote also declined slightly, 59.6% to 57.1%. Le Pen's total of votes cast, 4.8 million, is up relatively little on his first big presidential showing, 4.5 million in 1988.
Part of the result is due to the mechanics of the presidential election's "personality politics", where six candidates from the mainstream right and five from the governing "plural left" coalition stood; part of it to voters believing that the second round would be between outgoing president Chirac and outgoing prime minister Jospin, and seeing no worthwhile political difference.
The essence of it, though, is that Le Pen's National Front has won, since its first breakthrough in 1984, a stable core vote of 10% or more. Le Pen is persistently the most popular politician among France's small shopkeepers and self-employed trade workers - 32% of their vote this year, 31% in 1988. He has scooped up the bulk of the old right-wing working-class vote. Twenty-six per cent of manual workers voted for him! (The often-told story that Le Pen's score comes from disillusioned Communist Party voters - "extremes meet" - is false. The ex-Stalinist CP has declined catastrophically, but its voters have overwhelmingly gone to the radical left, to the Socialist Party, or to abstention - which was at a record 28.4% this time. Le Pen's working-class vote comes predominantly from workers who previously voted traditional right, and secondarily from previous Socialist Party voters).
In France, the mainstream right and mainstream left have run the country in "cohabitation" (left president and right prime minister, or vice versa) for 14 of the last 16 years, since 2002. The Greens and the Communist Party are in the government coalition. The electorate's disgust has reached boiling point - and Le Pen was best placed as the protest candidate.
France has a crisis of working-class political representation - like Britain, though in different form. "All the blame rests with the 'plural left' government... the destroyers of social democracy and the old labour movement! They have preserved the corrupt and illegitimate Chirac; they have turned the 35 hour week rotten through promoting 'flexibility' and casual working; they have battered the public services and secular education; they have privatised more than the right did; they have introduced pension funds under the label of 'wage-worker savings'; they have applied the Juppé plan (the right-wing plan against which the 1995 strikes erupted) in health care; they have pushed youth into cheap labour; they have participated in the USA's wars" (Liaisons).
Le Pen has made his score by presenting his National Front as "fascism lite". The essence of fascism, what distinguishes it from the commonplace racist right wing, is a mass mobilisation of the ruined middle classes and unemployed to crush, by violence, any labour movement autonomous from the state. Le Pen poses as electoralist, non-violent, well-behaved.
For him - he has a long Nazi past - that is just tactics. "Le Pen is the political heir of fascism and Nazism, as are Jorg Haider in Austria and Silvio Berlusconi in Italy. But it is not fascism which is at the gates today. There is a deep left-wing radicalisation in society, strikes are on the up, and anti-capitalist themes are becoming more popular. There are no storm troops or fascist militias - and of course we have to crush at birth any attempt to launch them.
"Le Pen is not strong from what he is, but from what has been given to him by the 'plural left' government's betrayal of the people and of democracy. The danger at the gates is the following: the election of the corrupt and illegitimate Chirac with a huge plebiscitary majority, on an anti-social and law-and-order programme inspired by Le Pen and the bosses' federation, even though in the first round he got the lowest-ever score for an outgoing president." (Liaisons)
Many radical youth feel they should vote Chirac on 5 May. "Vote swindler rather than fascist!" But that would only worsen the chief immediate danger - Chirac as president with much of Le Pen's programme - not combat it. Any good effect against Le Pen achieved by adding some radical-left votes to Chirac on 5 May would be much outweighed by the bad effect of the radical left rallying to a hugely-discredited bourgeois political establishment.
It is on the streets, in the workplaces, and on the picket lines that fascism will be pushed back.
The first step should be a huge effort to unite the whole labour movement and left to demonstrate on May Day. Le Pen's troops will march the same day - in honour of Joan of Arc - and they must be massively outnumbered.
New efforts to merge, or at least to coordinate, the main forces of France's Marxist left - Arlette Laguiller's Lutte Ouvrière, and Olivier Besancenot's LCR - are urgent, as is a drive to assemble the beginnings of a new workers' party from the three million radical-left voters. The left needs to fight to reorganise and unite France's much-fragmented trade union movement, and, more generally, to establish a united front of the whole labour movement in action against Le Pen.
In Britain, we can help by being numerous on the streets on May Day, too. And by learning the lessons. Le Pen's is only the latest in a series of fascist electoral successes in Europe - Italy, Austria, Belgium. Blair's cynical spin-lying New Labour is generating exactly the same sort of mass despair and disillusion that Le Pen profited from in France. In the June 2001 elections it expressed itself mainly in mass abstention, and only in a few places as electoral gains for the fascist BNP.
This lull will last only as long as the British far right remains unable to get together a sufficient electoral profile. Unless the working-class socialist left here can establish itself as the prime recourse for the dissatisfied, unless the labour movement can be remobilised as a positive force for change, we will soon face the same dangers as France. We have no time to waste.
