In the market of Aix-les-Bains, a squad from the National Front's
youth wing is trying to wake its compatriots up.
They are led by David Berton, a 25-year-old law student.
And their party is the most popular among young people in France,
though this stallholder isn't buying what it has to sell.
We simply love our country, sir.
Aix is a sleepy spa retirement town on the edge of the Alps,
full of pensioners who have tended to vote centre-right in the past.
But the right's candidate is enmeshed in a corruption scandal.
The Socialist left lies in ruins after five years
of Francois Hollande.
So the usual suspects seem to be out of season,
this election season.
And with 25% of French youth unemployed, support
for the National Front has doubled among young people in five years.
If you thought these elderly voters would line up
alongside him, then think again.
"I can't stand the National Front", this woman told us.
Too many remember the racism and anti-Semitism of the party's
past, so its makeover, including a new party emblem,
the blue rose, doesn't quite wash.
Though a professional clown, known as Bozo, told me
Marine Le Pen's time had come.
Over a lunch of local fare, which is countless forms
of melted cheese, I'm struck by how their party has changed.
True, this group is overwhelmingly male.
But they speak of how the National Front has been
"decontaminated" and their leaders, like David, are studying
for college degrees.
And
it's always surprising when any proud Frenchman
confesses to admiring
the UK.
I hadn't expected such a warm welcome.
But clearly Brexit has changed things.
And terrorism has shifted France's political centre
of gravity to the right.
I'm taken to watch this stunt on a bridge over the A43 motorway.
Like everything they do, it's filmed for social media.
No party uses it more effectively than the National Front.
They tell me they are not fascists, just patriots.
That this is their best ever chance of seizing presidential power.
Though judging by the less polite signals coming
from some of the cars, many are still not convinced.
And that is largely because of the party's vehement
opposition to immigration.
At the group's office, we are told they want to preserve
France's heritage from before the 1789 revolution.
Cutting immigrant arrivals to just 10,000 people a year.
In the corner there's a book by the National Front's founder,
Jean Marie Le Pen, looking disconcertingly like Donald Trump.
And this evening Le Pen's granddaughter, Marion,
is the controversial speaker at this rally in Aix-les-Bains.
She's the star turn of her party's youth movement,
an MP at the age of just 27, but speaking without a microphone
because somebody has sabotaged the sound system.
The organisers blame a rogue technician -
possibly in cahoots with France's oldest trade union, which is angrily
demonstrating outside.
David
can't resist taunting his left-wing critics.
But the irony is that there's barely a shred of difference
between his economic policy and theirs - which amounts
to protectionist state control.
What is different is the xenophobia.
Once the microphone's fixed, Marion Marechal Le Pen says France
is threatened by a wave of Muslim immigration.
And she paints their biggest rival, Emmanuel Macron, as a poster child
of the business-class global elite who see France as a cultureless void
where people can come and go whenever they want.
The clown from the market has turned up.
For what has turned out to be a fresh-faced elegy
for the disappearing land of Marie Curie and Voltaire.
And even if the polls suggest only one fifth of French voters
want to leave the euro, Le Pen believes her aunt
will prove the pollsters wrong.
We used to be described as extremists, she told me.
Because we talked about things others weren't ready to discuss.
Now they are talking about them, she said, and you can't call us
extremists any more.