The day when… In 1988, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s score in the first round disorients the right “Le Monde” archive of May 3, 1988. In this live broadcast dedicated to the electoral campaign, we evoke each day a significant moment of the last presidential elections through an article in Le Monde. We now come back to the significant episodes between the two rounds. Today… May 1, 1988. Sometimes failures are victories. That day, it was time for jubilation at the National Front (FN), which not only celebrated Joan of Arc, an allegory of patriotic resistance, but also Jean-Marie Le Pen. Admittedly, he will not be in the second round of the presidential election. But the founder of the far-right party won 14% of the vote in the first round, for his first participation – seven years earlier, the sponsorship of elected officials had failed him to compete. The May 1 rally takes on a new meaning and must honor the one who now passes for presidential. So we “erased the too conspicuous asperities” of the large family of the far right, tell our journalists Philippe Boggio and Pierre Georges. “Defrocked” the scouts of Europe, the “small foreign neo-fascist groups”, as well as the “crusaders of Archbishop Lefebvre” – the traditionalist bishop, wind up against the Vatican Council II, which the pope will excommunicate a few weeks later late. The crowd, “wisely lined up region by region, accent by accent”, must only be blue-white-red, and the men in blazers of the order service “separate the skinhead from the good grain”. We celebrate, that day, “the end of shameful and groupuscular Lepenism, power, already, at the end of the votes”, note the authors. Another article in the same edition of Le Monde analyzes the political shock wave caused by the National Front. On the right especially, where one wonders if it is necessary to get closer to the frontists, as invited by Charles Pasqua, at the risk, explains Jean-Marie Colombani, that “the RPR’s takeover of the FN becomes a takeover of the FN on the RPR”; that a “cleared Le Pen” deprives the right of alternation; and that François Mitterrand uses the pretext of such an association to return the Republican right to the camp of the antidemocrats. In the second round, a few days later, Jacques Chirac loses.