The cafe on the Rue d'Orléans has changed owners

The cafe on the Rue d'Orléans has changed owners. Before, while Dreux knew he would find there the "friends of the Front." As for the two clubs karate. People said, in the city, there was "the club of the Arabs" and "the club of whites." "A club for whites", previously led by elders of the CGT, had started to speak "as Le Pen", in less than three years. In high school downtown, teachers had wanted to boycott traders supporters with a little too far right. They had to abandon after having understood that they would avoid the baker, the cheese, newsagent and grocery stores.


Today, the small Pakistani community on the plateau, which has created its cricket club. The signs posted in front of the council candidates from all backgrounds to municipal governments. Every morning, 3800 Drouais take the train to Paris without fear of insecurity. And for the second time, the FN failed to submit its own list. Unable to find the 39 names needed to apply in the constituency that was once its stronghold.

On the RN 12, a few yards from where the gendarmes are accustomed to install their radar, there really is a large poster: "Tired of being plucked? Vote National Front." But the small permanent FN, on the first floor of a building downtown, is mostly deserted. Given current and activists, everything has been centralized in Chartres, the other major city in the department of Eure-et-Loir, the organizational meetings for bonding night, the galette des rois in January and dinners - monthly debates, in a restaurant with a menu at 12 euros included.

"Before, we drank champagne with every election. Ah fine scores!" Laughs Roger still Biewesch, showing pictures where he celebrates with Jean-Pierre Stirbois, the man by whom the National Front came to Dreux, and Jean-Marie Le Pen. Twenty-five years of activism, "as the good memories." The CRS arrived at the town hall, with the media and left-wing activists who were protesting "not to fascism!" "It bagarrait a little," Roger smiled. Can "Jean-Pierre" was killed in a car accident and, in the markets, it has seen "Marie-France". "The widow Stirbois", it was in the city.

Elected MP in 1989, touching even 44% eight years later, "Marie-France" was a pleasure to skinning the name of the RPR mayor of Dreux, Gerard Hamel, in a slip of voluntary: "Gerard Ahmed," and Frente buddies laughed. Nobody knew how to counter this candidate who would stroke his cheek and children back of the neck kindly old ladies so that they do not take cold. "This was our star, say activists still in the National Front.

And then, ten years ago, the right and left have put the package to remove "the shame of Dreux. The RPR who had made an alliance with the Front in 1983 said infréquentable six years later. The left was scuttled twice, preferring to vote for Gerard Hamel rather than pass up the FN. The state and the council did the rest: reinforcement of police, video surveillance, round in the stairwells, rehabilitation of slums and political integration. There are still three years, the council has had to organize visits by bus to reassure executives of companies who refused to move into "the city's Front."

When Marie-France Stirbois has left the region in 2001, to be elected in Nice, the small troupe of his followers has understood that this was a bad sign. Many have flown a piece of black crepe when it was terraced by cancer on April 17, 2006. Covering as much mourning their heroin as major o'clock in the FN in Dreux. In the last election, the far-right party was rolled, just 10% in the first round of the presidential elections in May 2007.

In the small room where they are found, Luce, about forty kilometres of Dreux, activists of the Front timidly tell their families shaken. They say they still cent in Eure-et-Loir. Fifteen in Dreux. That evening, a small quarantine of them gathered to support the seven militants FN to be short-listed "miscellaneous right" to the town hall in Lucé.

There is Marie-Therese, "came a few years ago, when she was" four children unemployed "Emmanuelle, who lives in three steps, in the district of Brussels," where young dealent in stairwells "Robert, in a loop that repeats" I am fed up! But fed up! " ; Gerard, a farmer who lives in a village but whose children are "rotten to the college in the town of next, because of the school map." And everything proletariat of cities and towns in the Beauce, who feels poor on Saturday, in the shelves of supermarkets.

Ironically chance, the next room has been reserved by the UMP. Even hour. Even place. Even parking. And just a thin wall separating the two electoral meetings. Philippe Loiseau, the owner of the federation FN of Eure-et-Loir, cares immediately, "Go see if they are more likely to side." In the last election, is not the right that has crushed?

"In markets, the home had been phenomenal, people were very receptive, ensures Pascale, only Sarkozy took our ideas, and in his mouth, people have found it better." Pascale is a hairdresser. Long blond hair, short, black boots and card militant past fifteen years. On Sundays and Mondays, when the show is closed, she went to hunt small game and returned to watch the parliamentary channels on TV. Sometimes, too, it sort distributing party leaflets in mailboxes and on the markets. She his technique when he refuses: "A smile and a replica, go, it makes no buttons ..." But she hears between cuts and dyes. "People have been released, she said, and it's crazy what they are close to our ideas, with businesses leaving and youth who do not have a job." For months now, she sees clients who pestent "against the yacht Sarkozy, Attali who wants to bring millions of immigrants, and the ministers left the government. They feel that everyone went to the gamelle. "