Next year's French presidential elections will be the first to take place since blogging caught the public imagination.
With surveys showing the French are among Europe's the most active readers of blogs, the ruling UMP party for the first time invited 12 of the country's leading blogs to attend its youth convention in Marseilles as part of the press corps.
The UMP's move is a sign that France is catching up with the US, where bloggers have been attending Republican and Democratic party conventions for years.
"A big population of French people only get their news via the internet, so we wanted to reach them, as well as to create some excitement around the youth convention," says Thierry Solère, head of internet strategy at the UMP.
Loïc Le Meur, author of one of France's best-known blogs - www.loiclemeur.com - says: "They have really created a buzz in the blogosphere. It is really very clever, as they have understood that they can reach several million people through us."
Instead of trying to "push" themselves towards bloggers, Mr Le Meur says politicians are starting to "pull" bloggers to them by inviting them to cover the political action.
But Cyrelle de Lasteyrie, author of the Bonjour America blog - www.bonjour-america.com - which aims to explain France to the Americans, says politicians should beware, because bloggers are not as deferential as the conventional media. For example, he says, if he gets a chance to interview Roselyne Bachelot, a UMP deputy, he plans to ask her for a kiss on camera.
Last year campaigners in favour of the European constitution were caught out by the No campaign's domination of the online debate ahead of the French referendum that rejected the treaty.
It has since become de rigueur for presidential candidates on left and right to start a blog. Ségolène Royal, the favourite to be the Socialist presidential candidate, has invited readers to submit ideas for a manifesto-style book she is publishing online.
Nicolas Sarkozy, interior minister and the leading presidential candidate on the right, has about 600,000 readers every month for his blog. His UMP party has bought keyword advertising with Google France, so people who search for words relating to recent political issues, such as banlieues (the run down suburbs), or sans papiers (illegal migrants), will be directed to the blog.
Mr Solère says feedback from readers' comments and other bloggers has helped to shape the presidential hopeful's policies on several issues, including the youth labour reform that sparked mass street protests earlier this year.
Dominique Perben, transport minister, visited the bloggers at the UMP convention to ask their advice on his blog. "You are going to crack open France's political system," he told them. "If you bloggers are talking about something it means something is happening and politicians should look at it."
France has stolen a march on the rest of Europe in the blogosphère. More than 4.5m people have created a blog in France, or 18 per cent of the 26.9m people who have an internet connection, according to a study published last week by Ipsos.
While 36 per cent of internet users visited blogs in France, this figure was only 24 per cent in the UK, 18 per cent in Italy and 9 per cent in Germany, according to a study in June by Média-métrie. France's blogging boom is being driven by the young: 80 per cent of French blogs were created by people aged 25 or under.
Mr Solère says candidates will have to be extra careful not to let their guard slip in public or they risk having their errors exposed in a blog.
"Everything will be picked up, which means that candidates will be asked about their views on all aspects of daily life. We must be ready for this."
This being France, it is hardly surprising that the arrival of bloggers in the political campaign has triggered some controversy. Mr Le Meur says some leftwing blogs have criticised the UMP for not inviting them to its events, while others claim that the 12 bloggers who accepted the invitation to be accredited for this weekend's congress have sacrificed the very thing that gives them their credibility by becoming part of the establishment.
