The dilemma facing the people of France next weekend has been neatly summed up by one commentator as a choice between “hope and anger”. Hope is represented by Emmanuel Macron, who, having come top in the first round of the French presidential election, now faces a run-off with Marine Le Pen. She is anger personified. Both candidates are populists, in that they climbed the greasy pole on a wave of public support without the aid of the mainstream parties. But only one, Ms Le Pen, represents the politics of ultra-nationalism which, with its overtones of chauvinism, has taken hold elsewhere in Europe, and the rejection of internationalism, the core of which, for French purposes, is the European Union. She stands for Frexit.

Mr Macron depicts the coming contest between himself and Ms Le Pen as between patriotism and nationalism. In a country which rather likes its politics reduced to abstract ideas, the battle is seen as a fight over the mystical soul of France, the very identity of the Republic. But there is another “ism” that has waded into the struggle, Catholicism, still the religion professed by the majority of French people.