But Royal’s strategy, as Daniel Bernard observed, consisted of betting that the French were sick of the culture of the old guard and the narrowness and sterility of its discourse. She has behaved with calculated insouciance. Last fall, she skipped a commemorative event for Mitterand in order to fly to Chile and campaign for Michelle Bachelet, a Socialist aspiring to be the first woman to be president of that country. Royal was mocked for grandstanding — the press jeered at her for wearing high heels — until Bachelet won, and suddenly it was Royal who represented the feminized Socialist future, her colleagues locked in the Mitterandist past.

Royal’s legend has grown apace. Like Nicolas Sarkozy — minister of the interior, abrasive leader of the ruling Union for a Popular Movement and a likely presidential candidate — she would not toe the party line. “I will guard my freedom of speech to the very end, come what may,” she announced to yet another magazine reporter. Like the current prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, she harbored a sense of destiny: “I am ready,” she told one and all. And unlike the others, she listened. On her Web site, Désirs d’Avenir (Wishes for the Future), she invited visitors to express their views rather than offering pensées of her own. But she could spit nails if she needed to. When I asked Royal whether her success had blunted the attack from the left, she shot back: “It’s getting worse, because they’re afraid. They’ve invested so many years themselves that they think my popularity is an imposture, ephemeral, unwarranted, undeserved, dangerous — as if a democracy of opinion is worth nothing.”

It is the democracy of opinion that Royal is offering the French people. She had, she told me, laid out her credo in the draft of the first chapter of a book she has begun to write, also to be titled “Désirs d’Avenir.” She sent me the piece, which was called “The Democratic Disorder” and which barely touches on France’s place in the world, the consuming preoccupation of her rivals’ manifestoes. Royal writes instead about the relationship of politicians to voters, arguing that diminishing turnout, the ominous popularity of the far-right-wing National Front and even the repudiation last year of the E.U. Constitution are all symptoms of a deep national disaffection from, and disgust with, mainstream political culture. These protest votes, or nonvotes, spring from citizens who are deeply pessimistic about their prospects, who feel that France is adrift. She argues, in the manner of centrist Democrats courting red-state voters, that the “nostalgia for ‘traditional values’ ” that many National Front voters cite is less a harbinger of protofascism than a rejection of value-neutral politics. The answer, she claims, is a new kind of politics, respectful of public opinion, modest in its claims, transparent, accountable and, above all, “concrete” rather than abstract. Her book, which is to appear in September, when the Socialists draw up their official list of candidates, is unlikely to narrow the gulf between Royal’s popular following and her standing in the party’s inner councils.

By the time I arrived in Paris, in mid-March, Ségomania had been temporarily supplanted by the nationwide furor over précarité, a word most usefully translated as “insecurity.” The French regard the protection of job security as a fundamental obligation of the state. But France’s unemployment rate, which has not gone below 8 percent for years and now hovers around 10 percent, is usually ascribed to the reluctance of firms to hire new workers whom it will find prohibitively burdensome and expensive to lay off. Young people with only ordinary credentials, including a college degree, often find it extremely difficult to break into the labor market; unemployment among the young is estimated to be as high as 22 percent. The employment system that has evolved in recent decades looks and feels very much like an American university, where junior faculty members scramble desperately to find a position, their passage upward blocked by the ponderous mass of tenured faculty, secure for life.

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