His biggest move came in 1972, when he formed the National Front with the neo-fascist Ordre Nouveau, promising to unite "the forces of the national right." In his first presidential campaign, in 1974, he won a dismal .7% of the vote. But with it Le Pen gained the attention of people still fuming over the Algerian defeat, as well as those angered by successive waves of immigrants from North Africa encouraged by French industry as a source of inexpensive labor. Economic stagnation and rising unemployment throughout the '70s drew even more people to Le Pen's anti-immigrant, xenophobic line and his vows to return "France to the French."

Though he failed to qualify for the 1981 presidential race, its winner — Socialist François Mitterrand — soon introduced proportional representation, giving wings to Le Pen's ambitions. The National Front scored 11% in the 1984 European Parliamentary polling and has remained at roughly 10% or higher in various elections since, thanks largely to the sinister appeal of its founder. Le Pen's own presidential bids have regularly notched around 15% — until last week's 16.86%.

Though that score is less than a 2-percentage-point improvement over 1995, voter concern over crime clearly rewarded the LePenist obsession with law and order that traditional parties were late to detect. Such converging priorities may also explain Le Pen's recent change of tone. Having already established his credentials with extremists — who thrilled at his 1987 description of Nazi gas chambers as simply "a detail of history" and cheered his 1988 pun on the name of a rival Jewish politician with the word "crematorium" — Le Pen lured a broader protest vote from those once repelled by his oratorical thuggery of the past.

"Le Pen never made an outrageous comment that wasn't designed to provoke a specific, desired reaction among supporters and opponents alike," says Lorrain de Saint Affrique, who was Le Pen's personal communications adviser until his 1994 expulsion from the party for protesting its fascist leanings. "He's the master of provocation, an incurable manipulator and a peerless demagogue. His recent discourse represents a marked change. Personally, I think he's terrified at having been overrun by a convergence of voters that have propelled him way out of his league."

Indeed, Le Pen's power has always relied on absolute control of contained, submissive political and biological clans. Le Pen has repeatedly opened his home to reporters as a happy model of French family values, but first wife Pierrette — who left him in 1984, and was later ruined by her husband's successive lawsuits — has described him as a "racist" household tyrant who forbade his daughters to watch documentaries on the Holocaust. She explained her ex's obsessive hatred of President Jacques Chirac for barring the road to political respectability, while other intimates report that Le Pen's childhood indigence left him a miser.

Though current wife Jany has restored an outward semblance of family tranquillity, the party was rent asunder in 1999 when Le Pen minions cited nepotism in their attempt to overthrow him. Though Le Pen triumphed, he was forced to repudiate the eldest of his three daughters when she joined the plotters to form a rival party. It was a brave act. Even those party and family members who aren't repelled by Le Pen's dictatorial style may wind up disgusted by his temper. Former associates describe Le Pen himself as "given to explosions of violence" — a notion consistent with his physical assault of a Socialist candidate during the 1997 legislative campaigning. More generally, de Saint Affrique, whose 1998 book In the Shadow of Le Pen is being reissued, describes his former boss as "so dominated by neuroses, spite, and egotistical obsession that his talents are wasted toward hateful ends" — a limitation he says Le Pen is fully aware of.

That is why, according to de Saint Affrique, Le Pen is so spooked by his first-round victory. Though his goal may have been to finish a close third — which would have allowed him to scuttle Chirac's re-election bid by backing Jospin in the second round, Le Pen has attracted non-FN voters who "are using him as the battering ram to break down the political system's locked gates." With no credible program of his own — and little affection from a majority of voters — Le Pen may have simply become the instrument with which the French are forcing change, to be discarded in distaste afterward. No wonder European extremists looking to stay in office are turning their backs on him.

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