The debate, in format, resembled the American version, circa 1980 or so. Two questioners on a studio stage -- no audience -- faced the six candidates, fanned out before them. The questions focused on policy, as did the answers. The candidates frequently interrupted one another and spoke over one another, but never heatedly. They often prefaced their disagreement by saying something like, "In all friendship...." There were only a few testy exchanges. Hollande, playing the Mitt Romney role of cautious front-runner, tried to float above the fray by summarizing the exchanges, prompting a vexed Manuel Valls, a Socialist deputy in Parliament and mayor of Évry -- and a second-tier candidate -- to cry, "François, for once, don't conclude!" Valls is a centrist, and he growled at Arnaud Montebourg, a deputy from the Saône-et-Loire department who has espoused a doctrine of "deglobalization," "No one here has a monopoly on the left." In general, however, the famously fractious Socialists surprised the public and disconcerted the UMP by sticking to the high road.

The substance of the debate would have been at least as strange to an American ear as the sober comportment. The candidates proposed responding to the financial crisis wracking Europe with an explicit industrial policy, with "a contract between young and old," with price controls and protectionism. I kept encountering the unfamiliar expression licenciement boursier, apparently a terrible thing. This expression was translated for me as: "downsizing in order to improve the standing of a company in the stock exchange." This is, of course, pretty much how Romney made his fortune. The rough American translation would be: "efficiencies." Martine Aubry, the party leader, proposed allowing employees to petition a court to replace the leadership of such a refractory firm; Royal proposed banning the practice. Told by the interviewer that her ideas were redolent of 1970s thinking, she shot back, "You could say that, and it wouldn't bother me."

The left has a very powerful wind in its sails right now. The party controls a majority of France's provinces and major cities, and last week, in a tremendous blow to the UMP, it took control of the Senate for the first time since 1958. France is already, in effect, a majority-left country. And the scandals besetting the ruling party have only begun to unwind in public: Le Monde has sued the French state after learning that secret-service agents had obtained the phone records of the investigative reporter who had been covering a scandal involving illegal campaign contributions. The paper stated in a recent front-page editorial that the affair pointed to the existence of a "black cabinet" -- a department of dirty tricks -- in the Élysée Palace.

Until now, what the Socialists have lacked is an appealing standard-bearer. Hollande may prove to be such a figure. He is a far more talented debater than his ex-partner -- and arguing well matters as much in French politics as does, say, authenticity in the United States -- and he is not an ideologically divisive figure. He has already won the endorsement of Jacques Chirac, Sarkozy's predecessor as president and UMP leader -- a startling defection and a powerful indication, according to Jean-Pierre Filiu, a historian at Science Po, that "deep-France is longing for a président normal." Filiu argues that the importance of a Hollande victory would go far beyond France because "a right-wing dominated Europe has proved unable to act collectively to face the euro crisis."

Those are, indeed, the stakes. In 2007, Sarkozy ran on a promise to change France's social contract, which, shaped by Europe's most powerful unions, offered a range of worker protections that employers found deeply onerous and that arguably put France at a serious competitive disadvantage within Europe, as well as globally. Sarkozy made some headway, but not much. A victory by the left would give France a chance to try an alternative formula, less "liberal" and more dirigiste. Returning to the statist politics of the 1970s doesn't sound like a forward-looking response to the current crisis. On the other hand, it sounds at least as plausible as the anti-state, anti-tax vision being peddled by the républicains here in America.

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