A record 16 candidates qualified for the first round, including three from the hard left and two from the far right, reflecting French voters' disaffection with the mainstream socialist and Gaullist movements that have governed them for 40 years.
Paris's African "back yard", he wrote in a history of the Rwandan genocide - in which he made clear his disaffection with French support for the Hutu regime - "remains its back yard because all the chicks cackle in French.
Mr. Sarkozy is already struggling with low popularity ratings in opinion polls and a general disaffection among the French with his personality and style.
The department in which Osny lies, the Val d'Oise, is notable for high youth unemployment, disaffection with the French republic and the growing popularity of Salafist ideas.
This led to shortages and disaffection among the French colonists, especially in the Caribbean, where they were surrounded by hostile British harbours and constantly raided and blockaded by British ships.
Even so, analysts say, the number who appear willing to do so by voting for the political fringe signals an alarming degree of disaffection, even anger, among the French at a critical time when they must decide which direction to take in addressing the grinding euro crisis and their nation's economic malaise.
"If there is a disaffection with ENA, there is indeed a revolution going on," said Jean d'Ormesson, a prominent French intellectual and writer.
Consider the two French producers who wanted to turn The Big Picture - my second novel, about American suburban disaffection and an accidental homicide - into some sort of quasi-Marxist tract, set in Paris at the time of the Algerian war (they didn't get the rights).
The preponderance of ethnic Moroccans under surveillance in the Spanish, French and Belgium antiterror operations reflects not only the size and dispersal of Moroccan immigrants across Europe, but also the intense disaffection of a growing fraction of young, mostly unemployed Moroccans who are vulnerable to the call to radicalism.
Does Protest Signify Disaffection?
