"So Sarko's adoption of Le Pen rhetoric doesn't bother you?"
Yes, it is pretty despicable, but maybe you cannot hear the cadences of the left's national chauvinism. The theme of French Social Solidarity endangered by Globalisation is a way of appealing to a coded nationalism, centred on France's "unique" welfare institutions. Of course the left does not have to make an issue out of Sarkozy's East European origins, they can leave that to Le Pen to spell out. All they have to do is to characterise him as a danger to the France's Social Fabric, and identify him with that ubiquitous 'globalisation', just as two generations ago they would have used the code 'cosmopolitan'. Sarkozy is of course responsible for his low-life nationalist rhetoric, but one should understand that his rather forced adoption of Frenchness was a defensive reaction to his opponents' allusions to his non-Frenchness, as well as being a strategy.
I agree with a lot of what Jean Christophe Helary says but this, I fear is one-sided:
"it is not the active classes that rejected her, but mostly the people who are traditionally more conservative: the elderly"
It is also true that Sarkozy did better among blue collar workers (if I read the Guardian right this morning) and among women - should we write off those constituencies as inactive or conservative? Is it not right that Royal did better among the BoBos? Are they the 'active classes'?