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"It's wrong to say that France has a single unique culture," he said. "In fact, the National Front is the movement in France that best defends multiculturalism. Let me explain. In your country especially there is a sort of destructive cultural imperialism, a global standardization of behavior, consumption, habits of thought, economic philosophy, that is causing European peoples to lose their identity. In defending our national identity we are protecting difference against standardization. The Islamic people loses its identity through the same process. We hope Muslims keep their roots, and don't try to integrate at the expense of them."

Lagane admitted that globalization has its merits. He should: he wears a stylish tattersall shirt, smokes Marlboro Lights, and does his writing on a brand-new Macintosh G3 laptop. (In fact, he left the Front just weeks after our talk, to start his own dot-com company.)"We're not against globalization," he said. "We're against a globalism that destroys the family and the nation." Certainly the National Front has changed since the early 1980s, when it tried to mix Reagan-Thatcher capitalism with a vociferous opposition to the then-prevalent high levels of immigration. The turning point seems to have been the Gulf War, in 1991, even today a staple of Le Pen's oratory, after which the movement adopted a virulently anti-capitalist stance and began to rail against American "imperialism," both economic and cultural. The new National Front seems to view Arabs as natural allies in a struggle against globalism, which it has traditionally viewed as American and Jewish. The Front is not against Israel, Lagane said (rather implausibly), only against its role, in cooperation with America, as policeman in the Middle East; what's more, he was heartened that "the Jewish community is evolving: it's now less viscerally led by left-wing Jews." He sounded almost like an old-style anti-American in his assurances that "the National Front has no quarrel with the American people."

It's worse than I thought. The Fronte Nationale has surrendered to the left. French nationalism now exists purely in opposition to the Anglo-Saxon Economics and the US. They are morphing into the fascists of the 1930's.