Christopher Hitchens is such a thoughtful analyst, it's always worth your while to read him and consider his views. He has a surprising take on the forthcoming French elections--he thinks Le Pen will do far better than we have been led to believe:

Le Pen may still be proven wrong next weekend in his overconfident assertion that people will vote for the real thing rather than a surrogate. Sarkozy, and others, may draw his fangs by stealing his voters. But some of us can remember a time when-as someone once put it-if you heard people discussing La Revolution in a French cafe, you realized that they were talking not about the last one, but the next one. I don't think it is sufficiently appreciated that France has now become the most conservative major country in Europe, where different defenses of the status quo are at war only with different forms of nostalgia and even outright reaction.