EECTION DIARY : 'TOUR DE FRANCE' !

With France's presidential candidates now into the frantic final fortnight before the first round of voting on 22 April, BBC Paris correspondent Caroline Wyatt is testing the atmosphere at three campaign rallies this week.
She began in Tours, where the frontrunner, centre-right candidate Nicolas Sarkozy, was campaigning and will finish at a Francois Bayrou rally in Besancon on Friday. But on Wednesday she was in Metz ahead of a visit by Segolene Royal.

NO TRUST IN ROYAL OR THE OTHERS
Metz, some three hours east of Paris on a slow train that ambles through the flat fields of Champagne, is a stolid kind of city.

Socialist candidate Segolene Royal will be holding a rally in Metz.Its public buildings in cream and red are imposing in a German style, with few French frills and fripperies.
If it were not for a man munching a baguette at a zebra crossing, you could imagine yourself across the border in Germany.
Even the cars stop at pedestrian crossings, not a typical French trait, while the people of Metz are rather more solid than their etiolated Parisian counterparts.
That may be thanks to Metz's long history as the pawn in the frequent wars between France and Germany over the past centuries.
From 1871 to 1919, Metz was indeed part of the German empire, and again German during World War II until it was liberated by the Allies.
"Some people wouldn't mind if it were German again," smiles Fouad Harjane, 27, who is trying desperately to find a job in Metz.
"Things are much cheaper over the border and young people are treated better. Here, if you try to organise a concert, it's incredibly expensive and the police patrol it incessantly. All they seem to expect from young people is trouble."
Alienation
His grandfather came to Metz from Algeria, fleeing the civil war there and looking for work. His father found a job in the local steel industry. But for Fouad, like so many young people in France, the jobs market appears closed.

You saw what happened in the suburbs - it was rage
Fouad Harjane
"I have an arts degree, but every time I go for a job they tell me I am overqualified," he says.
"I even went for one in construction, but they said that too."
Fouad is an articulate young man, who is fluent in English, but he is beginning to lose hope.
Now he spends his time helping organise rallies for the CGT trade union.
I ask him if it is harder to get a job in France if you are called Fouad rather than Philippe.
"Yes!" he says, "but it's a wider problem for all the young. We are in the middle of a severe social crisis in France. We said no in the European Constitution referendum because we don't want fewer rights for young workers and people in France than our parents' generation.
"We don't want more capitalism. And you saw what happened in the suburbs - it was rage exploding after Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy promised to wipe the 'rude boys' from the streets."
Fouad will not be voting for any of the candidates in this election. He does not trust any of them, or believe they have the solutions for France.
'France needs reform'
Young lawyer Audrey Zeher, 28, disagrees with him entirely.
She works at the European Court of Justice across the border in Luxembourg, travelling an hour and a half to work every day.
"France needs reform urgently, and the only man to do that is the right wing candidate Nicolas Sarkozy," she says.
"He has the ideas and he can help us."
As a firm believer in the EU and a strong French voice within it, she says Mr Sarkozy is the only candidate who can offer real French leadership and heal the rift left by the French 'non' in 2004.
Later tonight, the Socialist candidate Segolene Royal will be holding a rally here in Metz, using this border town as the base from which to flesh out her foreign policy, especially on Europe.
Debate over foreign policy has been almost entirely absent from this increasingly vicious election campaign, in which all the main candidates are now exchanging personal insults or questioning each other's character (or in Jean-Marie Le Pen's case, implying that the French will not vote for Sarkozy because he is the son of an immigrant.)
Identity debate
Perhaps the lack of debate on foreign policy is because France is too busy looking morosely and introspectively at its own problems, rather than engaging with the outside world?
Questioning what it means to be French, with each candidate wrapping themselves in the tricolour.
"The whole patriotism debate is wearing really thin," says Fouad.
"And for Segolene Royal to talk of the need for each French family to have a flag at home is just not part of the left's philosophy.
"We on the left should be outward-looking, international, but this is not."
Those attending tonight's rally may disagree, but Segolene Royal is seen with suspicion by many. "She is authoritarian, but not very competent," believes Audrey.
"If she won, France would continue its current slump, young people would have no better chances than they do now."
As we leave the cafe we have been sitting in, the imposing stone buildings cast a chill over the pedestrianised streets.
It feels rather like the chill that seems to have overwhelmed France in this election campaign: a sense of national gloom and suspicion of the nation's politicians, along with a deep mistrust between the generations, with few young people truly believing that the older generation has their best interests at heart.
It is a gloom that the next French president, whoever it is, will find difficult to dispel.
SARKOZY COMETH
The high-speed TGV train from Paris to Tours takes less than an hour but it transports you into another world: from the big city into the provinces, and a sleepy town of just over 300,000 people that is known as the "garden of France", as its green fields lie between the Loire and Cher rivers.

Nicolas Sarkozy was campaigning in Tours on Tuesday.
The main employers here are the university and the university hospital, though Tours is also home to France's first online bank.
According to the university's political science lecturer, Jean-Philippe Roy, voters in Tours share similar concerns to those in the rest of the country.
They worry about the rising cost of living and fear that politicians in Paris are becoming ever more removed from the realities of life for those outside the city.
In the suburbs of Tours, where brightly coloured washing hangs drying on the balconies in the sunshine, those worries are magnified.
Nasrine is half-Palestinian, half-French and says she is determined to vote in these elections:
"I support the smaller candidates, because I feel that the main candidates don't offer any solutions on globalisation.
"At the moment, it's only benefiting big companies in France, not the little people or immigrants."
The candidate she fears most is the UMP's Nicolas Sarkozy, who held a rally in Tours on Tuesday night.

These activists want young people to vote in the elections.
"He wants France to adopt the US economic model. I know France has big economic problems, and it needs to change, but that would be a disaster," Nasrine says.
"He would make the rich richer and the poor even poorer, and make the middle-classes poor too. And he would do nothing for immigrants either."
Her friend Nadia is part of Diversi-T37, a group that is working in the suburbs to encourage youngsters to vote.
She says she does not care which way they vote, as long as they do, and can feel that they have had a say in France's future direction and how it shapes itself over the next few years - and whether it becomes a country in which the children and grandchildren of immigrants are encouraged to succeed.

BBC NEWS REPORT.