By Darrin McMahon With the first round of voting not scheduled until late April, it is still, by French standards, early in the campaign. And yet the French presidential race--and perhaps European politics more generally--took an interesting turn last week when the centrist François Bayrou surged in the polls to within reach of the two front-runners, the Socialist Ségolène Royal and the conservative Nicolas Sarkozy. While Sarkozy still leads, according to the latest poll, with 28 percent of intended votes, Bayrou has now pulled even with the floundering Royal at 23 percent, and his trajectory since mid-January has been steadily upward, whereas his rivals have steadily fallen, as one can see here. A former classics teacher, who hails from good rural stock in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques, Bayrou left the classroom to take over the family farm when his father died unexpectedly in 1974, and then embarked on a political career. Bayrou thus embodies two critical qualities the French like in their leaders: intellectual cachet and a connection to the land. But what makes Bayrou's candidacy most interesting is his self-conscious embrace of third-way governance--something that has long been conspicuously lacking in France. Although his party, the Union for French Democracy (UDF), is an electoral alliance, it was founded by an anti-Gaullist conservative, former French President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, and has served as the base of such notable right-leaning centrists as former prime minister Edouard Balladur. And yet, Bayrou, who has led the UDF since 1998, describes himself proudly as a "Clintonian," speaks fondly of Al Gore, and praises the example of Tony Blair. In his campaign platform, Bayrou vows to end France's laughable (and largely ignored) 35-hour work week, free businesses to hire with fewer strings, and drive down the deficit. He has also pledged to re-submit the scuttled European constitution to the French electorate for another look. It is difficult to say at this stage, of course, what a Bayrou presidency might mean for France. But the language of triangulation is encouraging in a country that has long balked at meaningful economic reforms to free its labor market, spur growth, and reduce chronically high unemployment. Whereas the brash and hard-hitting Sarkozy might well push harder, he would likely encounter stiffer resistance from the unions and Socialists. Bayrou, by contrast, promises a kinder-gentler politics of reconciliation and common cause that could just work. It is interesting in this connection to note that Bayrou's talk of uniting-not-dividing is more than just the political spin du jour. In 1993, in fact, Bayrou published a biography of his hero Henry IV, the early seventeenth century French king of "Paris-is-worth-a-mass" fame. Henry never uttered those words, but he did heal a nation long divided by bloody sectarian strife by splitting the difference between extremes. Bayrou sees in him a model. "To encounter Henry IV," he writes, "is to encounter a reconciler." Unfortunately, the book, Henry IV: Le roi libre, is now out of print. But if Bayrou's numbers continue to rise, Flammarion will be sure to bring out a new edition, and that will give people like Open University's own resident French historian David A. Bell the opportunity to do what he did so well the last time a major French politician published a work of history: read the past against the grain of the present. I have a hunch that Bayrou's book would fare better in his hands than Dominique de Villepin's vainglorious Les Cent-Jours, Ou l'esprit de sacrifice. Sometimes, what is good for the present is also good for the past.