He thus escaped the fate of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the French far-right-winger, who became a demon-worse than les boches and les américains -when he managed to qualify for the run-off in the French presidential election last month. The 73-year-old Mr. Le Pen, a perennial candidate, won a sixth of the vote in the first round, comparable to some other showings of his. But in a fractured field, this was enough to earn him a head-to-head shot at Jacques Chirac, the haggard and crooked incumbent. Eighty percent of the French electorate then did the right thing, and the far-right ogre went down to defeat.

The two politicians were in fact different. Mr. Le Pen, an ex-paratrooper, fought in France's last colonial wars in Algeria and Indochina and had whiffs of an even more unsavory past (he called the Holocaust a "detail of history"). In a tradition going back to Colbert, his economic ideas were dirigiste and nationalist. Fortuyn was in many respects a leftish libertarian: He wanted to cut taxes and spending, and he was on the edge of Dutch social innovation, favoring drug legalization and euthanasia. His open gayness completed the mix. He wanted to get paid, get laid, get high and die when he could no longer do the first three to his satisfaction.

What linked the two men was their opposition to sky-high immigration. Immigrants make up an estimated 10 percent of the population of Holland, and 45 percent of the population of Rotterdam is non-ethnic Dutch. Both Fortuyn and Mr. Le Pen also campaigned strongly on the related issue of crime. European crime rates, except for homicides, are often as high as, if not worse than ours, especially in urban ghettos-which, in Europe, are populated by immigrants.

European immigration is not an abstraction, nor is it (as it is in New York) a gorgeous mosaic-a phenomenon with so many faces that it's faceless. European

immigration has a local habitation and a name. The newcomers come from Turkey, or from across the lake of the Mediterranean. They are Middle Eastern Muslims. Mr. Le Pen stridently identifies them with what he sees as France's problem. Fortuyn was often more polite, but no less blunt. "I'm not anti-Muslim," he claimed the month before he died. "I'm saying we've got big problems in our cities. It's not very smart to make the problem bigger by letting in millions more immigrants from rural Muslim cultures that don't assimilate."

Turning Mr. Le Pen into a Nazi and Fortuyn into a Le Pen is a way for Europeans to fight and win yesterday's wars while ignoring today's problems. If Europe's pressing issue is the ghost of Hitler, still walking the battlements after 57 years, then a Frenchman or Dutchman can do what his father did (or didn't do) in World War II and fight that battle over again. But if Europe faces a new problem in the form of unassimilated Middle Eastern immigrants, then old slogans and modern pieties will not be the best way to deal with it.

Are European opponents of immigration typecasting an entire civilization? Why don't people from "rural Muslim cultures," as Fortuyn put it, assimilate there?

Some do, of course. Fortuyn had his own cadre of supporters of Middle Eastern ethnicity, often shopkeepers who did not want to be robbed and vandalized by criminal freeloaders in their own communities. If immigrants don't assimilate, then surely P.C. governments who do not make Frenchness or Dutchness the ticket to participation in their societies must bear a great share of the blame.

What problems do the immigrants bring with them? No one from the Middle East (with the limited exception of Turks) can say that he has lived in a free society. The sleep of freedom produces monsters. Middle Eastern dictatorships and kleptocracies are supported by European (and American) oil and arms deals; to that extent, the First World colludes in the Third World's bondage. Yet most of these regimes have arisen from local soil. It is hard to pull the puppet strings of foreign countries, as the Europeans learned when they were colonial powers, and as we have learned in our more recent imperial experience. (Where now is the Shah of Iran?) So the sheiks and kings, the secular brutes and the one-party army officers, are domestic products, and their survival is a symptom-like mildew in a wall-of underlying structural damage.

It's easy to laugh at the discomfiture of Europe. Certainly the Europeans have been smug pains in the butt during our half-century-long struggle with the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. Now that they have their own minorities, which do not even share their history and their religion, let them stew. In his recent book The Death of the West , Patrick Buchanan wrote that Europe will inevitably fall to the Middle Eastern invasion, because declining birthrates require its welfare states to import workers. Victor Davis Hanson, the military historian, argues that as Europe becomes ever more fractious and bitter towards us, we will embrace our immigrants from Mexico and re-orient our civilization towards this hemisphere-a version of Oceania, the Anglo-American empire of George Orwell's 1984 , minus Airstrip One (i.e., Britain).

I feel more sympathetic toward Europe, if only out of self-interest. Several of the 9/11 hijackers were recruited or based in Germany. We don't want the continent to become a pirate's nest of murderers. We are, let us hope, gradually becoming serious about open borders and internal cultural Bantustans. We paid a heavy price for frivolity last fall. Maybe Europe will learn from our example.

Sunday, Election Day in France, was like any other Sunday for us. We strolled to the outdoor market. Algerians, Moroccans and Tunisians- Les Arabes to the French-work all the stalls, calling out prices behind piles of zucchini, melons, strawberries, a profusion of produce. These are the newcomers-not us-that Mr. Le Pen and his supporters would like to chuff off, even if their French is better than ours and their role in society as purveyors of food more integral.

The mania for anti–Le Pen manifestations , or street marches was nearly over by Sunday, though "FUCK LE PEN"-in English-was still graffiti'd on the Bastille memorial, just below the graceful, gold-winged statue of Mercury.

Paris feels to us like a socialist paradise with its cheap medicine and cheap, good wine and low rents, but Parisians look scraggly and tired. It's partly à la mode . Men under 50 affect an unwashed, hairy look-a middle-aged intellectual alighting from a Vespa who believes his long, wind-blown locks are sexy, could be the national image. After 50, the men may begin to resemble Milosevic, foreheads lurching at chins. The women too, despite the cliché of French chic, look more weary than soignée these days. It's the pack-a-day smoking, but also the cheap shoes.

They don't have the disposable income we do; an economic ranking recently put them at 25th. Subway cars are plastered with advertisements for a school that teaches "Wall Street English." A man in a double-breasted suit bares white teeth, on his way to unimaginable riches thanks to his new facility with the language of business.

We never get past the McDonald's next to the market without our toddler calling for a burger and fries. My husband loathes the visits (self-hating Americans here regard Mickey D's as the very incarnation of national embarrassment, right up there with W.'s mug). But sometimes I can't deny the tyke an opportunity to get in touch with his roots.

A plastic toy accompanies the Happy Meal. This season's trinkets are intricate replicas of the creatures in Monsters, Inc. , now showing on screens here as Monstres et Cie . While our little darling and his French peers push their toys around on the Formica, we try to guess in what country corporate slaves are at that moment producing these critters for our national eatery.

Mickey D's is an American outpost here, but there are also the posters of De Niro and Eddie Murphy on every bus stop, and everywhere cheesy American pop tunes of the 70's and 80's-but what do they mean to the French, who don't even have their Wall Street English down?

Edmund Burke, attacking the French Revolution, accused the French of being people who can only express themselves in extremes. Perhaps Mr. Le Pen and all the votes for left-wing fringe candidates bear this out. But the French aren't expressing themselves much in other ways. Parents here complain about the unforgiving rote-teaching method, and say that science and technology have been erasing art and culture as the "cool" things for children to learn in public schools. This is a country that so reveres art that every other street is named after an artist or scribbler, but besides Amélie , most of us can't name a French cultural product that has crossed the water in the past decade or two.

At the market, the Arabs call out their prices in euros, but they still post prices in francs-even though francs haven't been in circulation for months. Mr. Le Pen's talk of going back to the franc sounds ridiculous. But the French still haven't got their heads around the new money. Watching men and women in the boulangerie struggling to count their euro change nearly five months after the switch while Tommy Tutone's "867-5309/Jenny" catches my ear, I recognize that something is in the process of disappearing, and it's not just the franc.

For all the differences between the French and American political systems, there are curious similarities between their current fiasco and the election that brought the Bush administration to power two years ago. Those parallels merit a moment's reflection before we condescend to mock them. In both countries, public interest and popular will were thwarted by apathy and alienated posturing.

The politics of posturing idealizes doctrinal purity over pragmatic partisanship. It encourages voters to select candidates who will never govern over those tarnished by the inevitable compromises of governing. It insists upon a lazy ignorance of the differences between major parties. It transforms the most important act of citizenship into impotent acting-out. It protests reality and rejects responsibility. Worst of all, it underestimates the threat from forces that are hostile to democracy and modernity.

Certainly that is what befell France, where inaccurate polling and elite boredom permitted the assumption that Jean-Marie Le Pen could never win more than his usual fraction of the presidential vote. Those who abstained thought that they would be able to register their true preference between conservative Jacques Chirac and Socialist Lionel Jospin in the second round of voting, after Mr. Le Pen and more than a dozen minor candidates had been eliminated.

There was a rational basis for that complacent assumption. Although Mr. Le Pen has broadcast his racist hostilities and his authoritarian nostrums for three decades, his National Front party never polled more than 15 percent, and usually got less. This time, however, thanks to declining voter turnout, roughly the same number of far-right ballots translated into nearly 17 percent of the total.

That was just enough to give this repulsive character-who used to sell recordings of Hitler on the street-a lead of less than 1 percent over Lionel Jospin, the Socialist prime minister and titular leader of the left. Roughly 44 percent of the diminished turnout was divided among left-wing parties, which had spurned Mr. Jospin despite such radical innovations as a 35-hour work week (and the addition of 900,000 new jobs in the French economy).

The French Socialists did make some concessions to global competition, and that's what ruined Mr. Jospin's reputation among the more doctrinaire elements of the left. Like Mr. Le Pen, they like to imagine that France can somehow isolate itself from economic and cultural change. They now face the choice of voting for the despised Mr. Chirac or risking even greater damage to their country.

There's an old slogan about Trotskyism that aptly describes this kind of electoral behavior and its consequences: "left in form, right in essence." Moldy ideologies and fringe "revolutionaries" may be confined to continental Europe, but Americans have their own tiny movement whose left-wing rhetoric promotes right-wing ascendancy. It's called Naderism.

The leader of that movement showed up recently in Florida to reiterate his denunciations of the Democratic Party, which was holding its spring conference in Orlando. He attracted a substantial group of his followers to a rally where he explained again that there was no significant difference between the two major parties.

Even while Ralph Nader was delivering his rote witticisms, the public-interest groups he founded were lobbying feverishly in Washington to defeat the energy proposals of George W. Bush, the President who owes his victory to Mr. Nader. At issue was the desire of Mr. Bush and his oil-industry backers to open the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge to drilling. A victory for the White House would have dealt a terrible symbolic blow to the environmental values proclaimed by Mr. Nader and his supporters.

Fortunately for the country and the caribou, the Naderites were proved wrong again. On a vote that tested whether Democrats could successfully filibuster the ANWR legislation, the Senate leadership kept all but a handful of Democratic members in line. Assisted by several dissident Republicans, mostly from the Northeast, and Vermont independent Jim Jeffords, they inflicted a bitter defeat on the would-be despoilers. (Mr. Nader himself was absent from that struggle, which was made necessary by his own role in the 2000 election.)

The Democrats, of course, are full of faults these days. Their reluctance to fight back is infuriating; their failure to articulate an alternative vision is dispiriting. Like the French Socialists, their bland leadership frequently seems to prefer boredom over conflict. They should realize-as France has now learned the hard way-that ennui can be very dangerous, too.