Two sides of the city, two faces of a divided nation

On a Sunday morning, the drive from La Courneuve to the 17th arrondissement of Paris takes eight minutes. In those eight minutes, you travel a thousand light years.

In both places yesterday, polling stations had been set up in primary schools. In both places, the voters chose from piles of slips of paper pre-printed with the 12 candidates' names. In both places, the electors retired behind the same kind of flimsy, grey curtains in the same kind of portable voting booths. They placed the name of their chosen candidate in the same sky-blue envelopes, marked République Française.

After that, the resemblance ended.

La Courneuve is, by reputation, one of the toughest and poorest and most inflammable of the multi-racial banlieues which surround Paris. Polling station number nine had been set up in the Langevin-Wallon primary school.

All around were shabby, peeling tower blocks, built in the 1970s. At intervals there were islands of prim, suburban houses, built in the 1950s, in the style of miniature chateaux.

Almost everyone that I spoke to - maybe 20 people of a multiplicity of races - told me that they had voted for Ségolène Royal. There was one vote each for Nicolas Sarkozy, Francois Bayrou and Jean-Marie Le Pen.

By mid-morning, there was a long, patient queue - women in islamic headscarves, men in skull-caps, young men in baseball hats, prim, middle-aged white couples - to place votes in the official urn.

One of the polling station workers said that he had "never seen such a high turn-out in La Courneuve" (an observation later confirmed by official figures showing a 10 per cent increase in voting by mid-day across the country and still higher in the Paris banlieues).

Many of the Royal supporters in La Courneuve were not really Royal supporters. They preferred more radical left-wing candidates. They said that they had decided, sometimes just before voting, to vote Royal, "to form a bloc" against Sarkozy or Le Pen.

Georgette, 64, from the French west indies, said that, "in her heart", she preferred the anti-globalist José Bové. "I had to vote for Ségo to stop Sarkozy, who would set this place alight. Anyway, Ségolène is, at least, a woman. Look at the mess that the men have made. They are interested only in war and money. Let a woman have a chance."

One of the few dissenting voices in the pro-Ségo parade was Marie, 70, a jovial woman with grey hair, who resembled everyone's favourite auntie.

I asked her to whom she had given her vote. She leaned forward and whispered: "Le Pen. Because there are too many foreigners around here. We are no longer at home, the French I mean." Polling station number 48 in the 17th arrondissement of Paris was in a primary school, five minutes walk from the Champs Elysées and the Etoile.

The surrounding streets are crammed with early 20th century, art nouveau apartment blocks where the rents go as high as Euros 3,300 (£ 2,200) a month (nearly three times the minimum French monthly wage).

Every single person that I spoke to here had voted for Nicolas Sarkozy. Some were previously Le Pen supporters. Some had been tempted by the Bayrou centrist option because they were "scared" of what a President Sarkozy might bring. All said that they had decided to vote Sarkozy in the end.

Not one said they had been remotely tempted to vote Royal (even one middle aged woman who said that she had voted for Socialist candidates like Francois Mitterrand and Lionel Jospin in the past). Laurent Vincienne, 35, an unemployed commercial representative, said: "I seriously considered going for Bayrou but, in the end, only in the last few days, I went back to Sarkozy.

He is clearer. He is more experienced. He has broad shoulders. He will be tough on crime and he will bring us towards the more liberal economic policy we need if we are going to compete with China and all the rest." A tale of two cities and two countries. At least two...

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