The Socialists and Chirac's neo-Gaullist R.P.R. have to face up to their own responsibility for France being at that shameful pass. The left, beaten and leaderless since Jospin's election-night announcement that he is withdrawing from political life, will clearly have the tougher time of it. Their unprecedented losses suggest to many observers that the government — along with pollsters and the press — was living in a fantasyland. "Until last Sunday you could feel that France was adapting to the modern world with fewer casualties than elsewhere," says Claude Askolovitch, who has written a book on the National Front and a Jospin biography. "But now it looks as if we suffered as much as the rest and didn't realize it."

How did they miss it? Part of the problem, Askolovitch argues, was that the Socialists and their partners forged their policies within the hothouse of government councils, not in public debate. It was up to Jospin, the hardworking and judicious arbiter, to conduct the balancing act between, for example, his left wing's push for a 35-hour workweek and the privatizations deemed crucial by more centrist figures. "Instead of reaching compromise, Jospin was imposing it in a judicious way," he says.

That balancing act didn't take the public's temperature seriously or often enough, leading to the ignominious jolt the left received in the election's first round. "Jospin presided over a kind of Marie-Antoinette left, with leaders who took taxis and never saw what a terrible adventure it is taking a bus these days," says philosopher Alain Finkielkraut. "They considered the perpetrators of crime in France as victims of the system. It's the fanatic resistance of ideology to reality."

With the blame game at its height, many on the left still maintain that the issue of crime was a demagogic creation of the press, Chirac and/or their ex-comrade Jean-Pierre Chevènement, whose left-nationalist Citizens' Movement got 5.33% of the vote. By playing up the problem, goes the argument, they plowed the ground for Le Pen's virulent seed of xenophobia.

Meanwhile, Socialist Deputy Jean-Luc Mélenchon wasted no time in laying the blame for the debacle on "those within the party who went on playing the music of the right." That was a thinly disguised dig at the Socialists' pro-market wing around Finance Minister Laurent Fabius and his predecessor, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, but also a call for the party to move left and recapture the more than 10% of the vote that went to extreme-left candidates.

Though mortally weakened, the Socialists remain the pole of the left, and they know they have to lash in other leftist parliamentarians to avoid a rout in the legislative elections. For the five years of Jospin's government, the artful formula for success was the gauche plurielle, a loose consultative process that allowed Jospin to count on the parliamentary support of rival leftist parties, from Chevènement to the Greens, the Party of the Radical Left and the Communists. The alchemy lasted for five years but was severely tested by a presidential campaign in which all five fielded separate candidates, many of whom campaigned against Jospin's record. Jospin's loss in the first round sealed that alliance's fate for good. "The gauche plurielle is dead," says Socialist Deputy Jean-Christophe Cambadélis, principal designer of the concept. "Our partners cut the bond."

In its place, Socialist general secretary François Hollande envisions a more disciplined "united left." The idea is to present a single leftist candidate in the 100 or so constituencies that could swing to the right, but tense discussions are ahead about whose candidate stands where — and whose stands down. The Socialists are in no mood to flatter the fractious partners whose egotism they believe robbed them of the presidential election. And although the moribund Communists are in no position to refuse anything, the Greens believe their improved showing merits new respect.

Even if the Socialists succeed in gathering the ragged troops under a single banner, the question is what will be inscribed on it. Jospin, who has recused himself from the discussion, offered his comrades only this Delphic advice: "Try to be in reality, not in myths." But what reality? In the short term, as Mélenchon and others stress, the Socialists have to win back the workers they lost to Le Pen and the extreme left. But the forces of the marketplace, bolstered by liberalizing pressure from Brussels, suggest that French Socialists will eventually have to adopt a more centrist profile like that of the German Social Democrats or even British New Labour. That prospect seems far off: when Strauss-Kahn told the Socialists' national council last Tuesday that "history has shown that [John Maynard Keynes did more for the working class than Rosa Luxemburg," he was booed.

The disarray on the left bodes well for Chirac, but he has problems of his own. In a parallel consolidation, his party pushed last week for the creation of a new Union for the Presidential Majority in a bid to overcome the longstanding divisions among the parliamentary right. But leaders of the smaller parties are balking. François Bayrou, head of the centrist U.D.F. who ran fourth in the first presidential round, said the new grouping would be tantamount to a "declaration of war" if it meant obliterating the structures of his own party. "As far as I know," observed neoliberal Alain Madelin of the Liberal Democracy, "we're not in North Korea or Soviet Russia."

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