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He stands a full head shorter than everyone else in the room, a wiry, frenetic little man whose tightly controlled smile is constantly breaking into uneasy glances and inadvertent scowls.

Throughout his life, Nicolas Sarkozy, 52, has fit awkwardly into the comfortable club of French leadership, like a brassy character actor dropping one-liners in the midst of a regal drama. In photos taken a decade ago, he stands out from the crowd like an awkward interloper: Surrounded by fellow ministers, he has always looked and acted like an outsider.

Sunday, Mr. Sarkozy will be the subject of the most important election France has held in half a century. Even if his Socialist opponent, Ségolène Royal, manages to overcome his 10-per-cent lead in the polls.

Ms. Royal was the one to beat at the beginning of the campaign. She exudes the sort of refinement that the French traditionally have liked in their presidents. But she made a series of potential career-ending gaffes during the campaign, and Mr. Sarkozy gradually crept further and further ahead in the polls.

Even Ms. Royal acknowledged Friday that the vote is essentially a referendum on his personality and reformist policies: She ended her campaign with a shocking warning that a vote for Mr. Sarkozy would be a vote for violence in the streets. “Choosing Nicolas Sarkozy would be a dangerous choice,” she told national radio. “It is my responsibility today to alert people to the risk of this candidate, to the violence and brutality that would be unleashed.”

While even Ms. Royal's aides said that this was a gross exaggeration, Mr. Sarkozy has sold himself and his policies as a violent break from French traditions — “le rupteur,” he called it at first, then softening it to a “tranquil rupteur” this year after advisers said it would upset voters. As the tough-on-crime minister in charge of France's national police during its turbulent recent years and as a short-tempered man who angrily rebuffs underlings who stray from his positions, he has become imbued with an aura of violence.

Some people, even admirers, say there is something decidedly un-French about this child born to a Hungarian immigrant father and a French mother with Jewish roots. That argument was used this week by far-right National Front leader Jean Marie Le Pen, who urged his followers to abstain from voting Sunday because Mr. Sarkozy, who has used anti-immigrant rhetoric to woo the Front's voters, is too much an outsider, insufficiently French and Christian. “It would be like letting some stranger come in off the street and sit in your father's favourite armchair,” Mr. Le Pen said.

On the other hand, he is a figure who is deeply familiar in France, the energetic man who comes from outside to take control in the midst of a crisis.

“He is the heir to the French political tradition of Bonapartism, and makes that argument for himself all the time,” says his biographer, Frédéric Charpier, who sees Mr. Sarkozy as an avid student of the Napoleonic method. “It is an authoritarian tradition within a democracy, in which France has a private economy but it is very state-focused, and the state remains at the centre of public life, and the leader is the centre of the state.”

Inside Mr. Sarkozy's campaign headquarters in a Turkish immigrant neighbourhood, where his office is dominated by a huge, stern-looking portrait of himself, his supporters liken him to other figures.

“I would say that he has the tenacity of Charles de Gaulle and the modernity of John F. Kennedy,” said Yves Jego, an MP who is one of Mr. Sarkozy's closest confidants. The de Gaulle comparison is familiar but still surprising since Mr. Sarkozy has worked hard to distance himself from the Gaullist wing of his right-wing UMP (Union for a Popular Movement) party, which owes its origins to General de Gaulle himself. His embrace of globalization, and of closer relations with the United States, are a break from the insular French vision of his party's founders.

But, as comparisons go, Mr. Sarkozy goes further than anyone else, reaching far beyond either Gen. de Gaulle or Napoleon to find an antecedent. Sweating profusely in a gymnasium in eastern Paris, he offers his audience a vision of a France transformed, with Nicolas Sarkozy at the centre of a millennial transformation.

“This has been a campaign gripped with a moral crisis, with an identity crisis that France may never have known in its history, except perhaps in the time of Joan of Arc and the Treaty of Troyes, when the national conscience was still quite fragile.”

That is quite a statement, implying that Mr. Sarkozy is the sort of figure France has not seen in 500 years, and that his country is facing the sort of crisis that has not occurred since then. It likens him to a Joan of Arc —the ultimate outsider, the ultimate defender — a bit of imagery that also happens to be enormously popular with Mr. Le Pen's radical right-wing followers.

He seems happy to enrage his followers on the right and the left, embracing contradictory ideas — affirmative-action policies and immigration bans, a more liberal economy and state takeover of key industries — often in the same sentence.

At root may be the fact that Mr. Sarkozy is a uniquely lonely figure in French politics.

“Sarkozy is not an intellectual. I have never seen any indication that he reads books. He spends his time in front of the TV in the evenings, he doesn't drink alcohol, he doesn't go out at night, he's something of a homebody,” Mr. Charpier said. “But he doesn't pretend that he's a candidate for the intelligentsia, and he's fine with that.”

There are many who suggest that his unsexy, unfatherly, fast-talking style is exactly what French voters want, after three generations of Gaullist paternalism.

“Even Hungarian journalists, whose readers love the idea of a guy with a Hungarian name running France, have told me they don't understand how the French people could elect someone who has such little allure,” Mr. Charpier said. “You could say it represents the new French defiance: We want to elect someone you wouldn't expect.”

Mr. Sarkozy's loneliness seems to extend deep into his private life. A physically awkward youngster whose father left when he was a child, he felt abandoned and was ostracized by his peers from early on.

He seems to have brought these emotions into his adult private life. He met his current wife, Cecilia, when, as the mayor of a Paris suburb, he officiated at her marriage to Jacques Martin, a TV personality, according to Catherine Nay's biography of Mr. Sarkozy, Un Pouvoir Nomme Désir (A Power Named Desire). Ultimately, Cecilia left her husband for Mr. Sarkozy, and the couple have a son together, as well as children from their previous marriages.

Then, in 2005, they separated after photos appeared in the papers of Cecilia with another man. Mr. Sarkozy had a year-long affair with a journalist from the right-wing paper Figaro, which ended abruptly in January of 2006, when Cecilia reappeared, in what some say was an election-campaign reunion. She lives in a separate apartment, and their young son attends school alone in New York. In the past week, she has not been seen at any of his campaign appearances, a subject of unusual excitement in the French media.

To understand why French voters are moving toward Mr. Sarkozy, all you need to do is visit a small business. At the small factory of Frantz Electroplating, a shop on the outskirts of Paris that employs 200, mainly immigrant, full-time workers, the owner, Jerôme Frantz, explained that he had been employing 250 until France's 35-hour work week and highly regulated labour laws made his business far less competitive with similar businesses in neighbouring European countries.

“For the first time in my life, we have an election where they're talking about businesses like ours, about making it possible for us to compete and prosper,” Mr. Frantz said. “We're talking about making it possible to compete and take advantage of the fact that we have the best qualified workers in the world. That's good. I'm not so interested in the talk about immigration. I think a factory like mine is proof that immigration works.”

That seems to be the view of a great many people who are voting for Mr. Sarkozy Sunday: They are excited about the prospect of economic reforms that will bring full employment back to France, as similar reforms have done in Britain and Spain, but they would rather not hear any more of the law-and-order, tough-on-immigrants talk.

“I would certainly support him if he wasn't using immigrants as scapegoats, if he wasn't fanning the flames of hatred every day,” says Azouz Begag, who was France's minister of equal opportunities in the cabinet alongside Mr. Sarkozy until last month, when he quit in protest against what he saw as Mr. Sarkozy's extremism, and joined the party of centrist François Bayrou.

Like many North African immigrants, he says he welcomes Mr. Sarkozy's economic reforms, but feels that his people are being placed in danger for electoral gain.

“I mean, this man is not particularly racist or anything like that,” Mr. Begag said at his home in Lyon. “It's just that he has no heart. He knows that if you want to gain the voters of the National Front, you have to say something against immigrants, against the alteration of French identity, and to claim that we're all slaughtering sheep in the bathrooms of our apartments. He's a pyromaniac … he starts the fires so that he can be the heroic figure who puts them out.”

What has shocked France the most, driving half the country away from Mr. Sarkozy in fear and the other half cautiously into his arms, is that he is talking about things that have not been part of French politics since the Second World War: ethnicity, religion, morality, and, above all else, the importance of order and discipline.

“It's certainly the first time in a very long time in French politics that the question of values made its way into a presidential campaign,” said Mr. Jego, the MP and likely future minister in a Sarkozy government. “He is saying that work is something to be valued, that this should be the France of people who get up early in the morning, and he is saying that the values of May, 1968, are wrong.”

Even critics agree with that point. “He's culturally from the right, which means that he can't be a real economic liberalizer, not all the way — his values will always stop him,” Mr. Charpier said.

“Values are far too important to him. … He gives far too much importance to everlasting social order: Things work like this, families are like this, these things do not change. There's a certain amount of demagoguery in what he says — he's a very smart person, and he is capable of saying more than one thing at once. It depends on what you want to hear.”