Jordan Bardella has been physically attacked twice over the past five days. Flour was thrown over him at an agricultural fair in Burgundy, then this weekend an egg was crushed on his head at a book signing in Moissac in the Tarn-et-Garonne. He walked away unharmed, but the incidents could easily have been more serious. They come at a moment when Bardella leads the polls to become France’s next president, with Marine Le Pen increasingly sidelined after she was barred from running by the courts. Right-wing officials and politicians are facing a steady rise in insults, threats and physical aggression.

France is edging towards a hierarchy of victims in which the acceptability of violence depends on the political alignment of the target

The National Rally is directly targeted by this violence. During last year’s campaign in Saint-Étienne, Hervé Breuil, a National Rally candidate, was assaulted by masked extremists and taken to hospital with a suspected stroke. And in April in Albi, ten hooded militants set upon Clément Cabrolier, the son of a National Rally councillor, beating him in the street until he managed to take refuge in a hotel.

A climate has taken hold in which assaults of National Rally politicians are increasingly treated not as political violence but as a form of........

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