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This year marks the death of one of France’s noblest political ideals: the cordon sanitaire. Born in 1987 with the publication of a letter, signed by 122 political figures on the French left, it urged the creation of a “republican barrage” against the rise of the anti-immigrant, anti-European, and antisemitic National Front. For nearly four decades, this call was repeated and heeded not just by the French left but also by the right. This resistance was embodied by Jacques Chirac, the Gaullist prime minister and president, who consistently warned against the temptation of seeking common ground with what he called, in 2002, the “poison of extremism.”

But that was then. What we might describe as the centripetal forces that made the cordon sanitaire have since given way to centrifugal forces that are unmaking it. As the first round of municipal elections made clear last week, these forces are now radiating from the ideological extremes and flattening the mainstream parties that had previously melded to make this barrage.

This year marks the death of one of France’s noblest political ideals: the cordon sanitaire. Born in 1987 with the publication of a letter, signed by 122 political figures on the French left, it urged the creation of a “republican barrage” against the rise of the anti-immigrant, anti-European, and antisemitic National Front. For nearly four decades, this call was repeated and heeded not just by the French left but also by the right. This resistance was embodied by Jacques Chirac, the Gaullist prime minister and president, who consistently warned against the temptation of seeking common ground with what he called, in 2002, the “poison of extremism.”

But that was then. What we might describe as the centripetal forces that made the cordon sanitaire have since given way to centrifugal forces that are unmaking it. As the first round of municipal elections made clear last week, these forces are now radiating from the ideological extremes and flattening the mainstream parties that had previously melded to make this barrage.

This gradual evolution of political forces was made manifest in the summer of 2024, when President Emmanuel Macron dissolved the National Assembly and called for a snap election. This move, meant to strengthen his wobbly parliamentary majority, proved as calamitous as it was impulsive. When the votes were tallied, the center-right coalition led by Macron’s so-called Renaissance party lost its parliamentary plurality. Far from heralding a rebirth of the party’s earlier electoral successes, the legislative election proclaimed its decline.

More critically, though, no single party or coalition could convert Macron’s own goal into a victory.........

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