FROM WASHINGTON:

The French election is over and the French pollsters were, shockingly, exactly right.

One of the problems in coverage of the election was that Macron’s policy were juxtaposed with Le Pen racebaiting, and not with her actual manifesto.  That’s partly a media problem, one which the press discovered for themselves the morning after the Brexit vote and then again after Donald Trump’s election.  But it was also Le Pen’s fault — her debate with Macron made it clear that she hadn’t given much thought to the economy at all, besides a few too-good-to-be-true promises of lower taxes and more jobs for Frenchmen.

It has been easy to imagine a Macron-era France.  What would France have looked like in the Age of Le Pen?  A corporate free for all with a Praetorian Guard of obnoxious Nigel Farage types, insulting the critics on TV?  A dreary, post-interesting, Hungarian-style Orbánocracy?

After the results came in and everyone could breathe again, I looked up Jane Kramer’s 1986 article for the New Yorker about the rise of Marine Le Pen’s father Jean-Marie, “The Mayor of Dreux” (found in Europeans, Farrar Straus & Giroud, 1988).  What I wanted was a vision of what a Le Pen might look like in power.  Marine, of course, was nineteen in 1986; the article is about her father’s party, which she would argue with good cause is not her own.  And admittedly it feels sort of medieval and arcane, this kind of prognostication, like a monk consulting Virgil to predict the date and time of the Last Judgment.

But for all their troubled history, Marine Le Pen, in the words of the New Yorker’s Moira Weigel, “has become her father’s daughter. But then, she always was.”  Grosso modo, anyway.  Read her review and see what you think.

In any case, I thought Kramer’s Dreux article would shed some light on the bullet just dodged. And — it did.  It really did.

It was all a little too familiar.

In response to newspaper allegations that Jean-Marie Le Pen had tortured Algerian prisoners: “Le Pen sued the two newspapers for defamation.  He… told the judge, ‘I have never had the authority to conduct interrogations… If I had, I would certainly have conducted them.”

“Le Pen likes to sue the people who criticize him.  The Seventeenth Correctional Court at the Palais de Justice in Paris has had a full docket of Le Pen’s lawsuits for so long now that reporters call it la chambre Le Pen.”

“[Le Pen-associated daily] Présent is known for monitoring Justice Ministry lists of people who change their names (Mohammed to Moland, Ben Ahmed to Reinhardt, Boulaloud to de Connick, Mahbouli to Michel)…. As for M. Badinter, a well-known [Jewish] law professor and civil-rights lawyer who has just finished revising the French criminal code, ‘he is the very symbol of a France open to foreigners.  His father was a furrier.”

“Le Pen’s appeal may have to do with intimations of violence.  It is not the cool, heel-clicking style of the commandant but something cruder, something at the edge of control.”

“He [Le Pen] is big, and he is overweight….  He flaunts his weight like a weapon.  His shirts pop open…. His holiday snapshots have him windsurfing in a tight black rubber suit.”

“Le Pen is rich…. Montretout [Le Pen’s exclusive gated community in Saint-Cloud] today is a hilltop bunker where the world is barred and megalomania can flourish.  Pierette Le Pen [Le Pen’s ex-wife] says that he husband promised her the Élysée as ‘a Paris pied-à-terre,‘ and in all likelihood he did.”

“Le Pen is shameless.  He is successful because he is shameless.  He knows that millions of Frenchmen are frustrated, and that their frustration has something to do with a conviction that history has betrayed them — and he exploits that conviction.”

So maybe we do know what a Le Pen presidency would have looked like.  Again, grosso modo.  But it’s all too familiar for comfort — especially on this side of the Atlantic.  France might not have found its new De Gaulle, but it dodged a bullet, and that’s no small relief.

Congratulations, Monsieur le Président, and good luck.