France has had five presidents in the 49-year history of the Fifth Republic. Each has been very different in character and style, as described by Pascal Perrineau, one of the sharpest commentators on French politics.

General Charles de Gaulle, the monumental wartime hero who founded the Fifth Republic, was hierarchical. His successor, Georges Pompidou, a well-upholstered and highly cultured Rothschild banker, was professorial. The eager, technocratic Valery Giscard d’Estaing was pedagogic. The sphinx-like Francois Mitterrand was enigmatic. And the beer-swilling Jacques Chirac has been prosaic. Which adjective will best describe the next president of France?

In the Atlas Electoral, an invaluable compendium of essays on the 2007 presidential race produced by scholars at Sciences Po university, Perrineau argues that the history of French presidential elections has been a process of banalisation. The recent reduction of the presidential term from seven to five years has only further desacralised the office. Voters are no longer looking for a providential, monarchical homme d’Etat in the mould of a General de Gaulle. Nowadays, as in other western democracies, voters crave a capable and ordinary leader who has the capacity to lead the country but remains approachable and close to the people’s everyday concerns. Which candidate best matches this identikit picture?

Nicolas Sarkozy, the challenger from the ruling centre-right UMP party who has been the frontrunner for most of the campaign, appears well aware of the electorate’s demands, and styles himself as the everyman of modern France, the grateful son of a Hungarian immigrant who wants to repay his country for the opportunities it has provided. In Testimony, his personal manifesto that has sold 300,000 copies in France and has now been translated into English, Sarkozy presents himself as a plain-speaking, straight-dealing man of action, far more concerned with practice than theory. ”To build, like love, is one of the most beautiful words in the French language,” he writes.

Chastising the ”theoreticians of nonchalance”, Sarkozy rejects the idea that France is some kind of ”sentimental memory” and argues that the country is in danger and urgently needs to be reformed. For him, France remains an important power with a universal message and a vital role to play in the world. But France is too inward-looking and immobile, over-anxious to protect its existing perks and privileges rather than boldly grasping the new opportunities thrown up by globalisation. ”We are falling behind in the rankings of great nations,” he declares. ”For 25 years France has ceaselessly discouraged initiative and punished success.”

As the self-declared champion of a newly confident Right that finally dares to speak its name, Sarkozy tries to nail the three lies he blames for suffocating France during the past 25 years. First, he argues that wealth cannot be distributed before it is created. He says France must loosen its rigid labour laws, and reward hard work and entrepreneurial success. Second, he rejects the idea that France can keep paying for today’s comfort out of tomorrow’s taxes. Lambasting the build-up of public debt from the equivalent of 20 per cent of GDP in 1980 to 66 per cent today, Sarkozy promises to cut government spending, shrink the state, and put the public finances in order. Third, he denounces the lie that the free-market economy - often described as liberalism in France - is something to be rejected rather than embraced. ”I do not understand how people can think, let alone say, that ’liberalism is as disastrous as communism’,” he writes, making a sly dig at President Jacques Chirac, the author of that quote.

Sarkozy also dwells on his personal experiences and devotes a section of the book to his stormy and well-publicised relationship with Cecilia, his second wife, who temporarily left him for another man before rejoining him. ”People often reproach politicians because they do not know ’real life’. Well I can say now that I have rubbed up against it,” he writes. The reader is torn between admiring Sarkozy for his frankness and being appalled at the shameless way he exploits the turmoil in his personal life for political profit. Such is the two-sided nature of Sarkozy, simultaneously candid and calculating.

”My conviction - perhaps the gamble I am taking - is that the French are much more clear-sighted and receptive to the world that surrounds them than people say,” he writes. But it is striking that the invigorating rhetoric deployed by Sarkozy in his book has been steadily diluted as the presidential campaign has unfolded. The bold revolutionary, who has called for a ”rupture” with Chirac’s failed regime, is sounding ever more like his equivocating former master. Sarkozy is appearing to wilt as the prospect of real power approaches.

Segolene Royal, the challenger from the Socialist party, has not yet penned her own book during the campaign - although this week she released a series of interviews with an editor of Elle magazine answering questions on subjects from A to Z. In the book, entitled Maintenant, Royal reveals what she thinks about the European Central Bank (it must be reformed), Turkish entry into the EU (conditionally in favour), and her relationship with Francois Holland, her partner and secretary-general of the Socialist party (he’s a brick).

However, Roger Lenglet, a philosopher and journalist, has produced a far more intriguing book on Royal by asking 84 ordinary voters what they think of the Socialist candidate. Lenglet’s contention is that public opinion has been ”privatised” by professional polling organisations, who manipulate the results to their own ends. He is determined to put the unmediated voter back at the heart of this campaign. The ”multi-mouthed monster” of public opinion that he stitches together like some modern-day Frankenstein is by turns astonishingly perceptive, consistently fascinating and frequently cruel.

As Lenglet writes in his introduction, Royal is capable of generating great political warmth, even if she is renowned for personal frostiness. Tellingly, she is almost always referred to as Segolene - ”a sweet first name that floats like a cloud”. Many voters, drawn from all classes and ages across France, admire Royal’s success in facing down the big beasts of the Socialist party to clinch her party’s nomination. They also appreciate her attempts to create a new style of more personalised consultative politics. The adjectives most often used to describe her are courageous, tenacious and beautiful. ”She seems to have perfectly understood her times,” says one voter.

However, two male respondents state bluntly that they would never vote for a woman candidate. Putting her own political career ahead of her children should disqualify her from the presidency, they say. Yet most other interviewees appear rather drawn to the idea of electing France’s first female head of state, saying she could be a wonderful ambassador for her country. Voters see her as tough but fragile, a strong personality who remains vulnerable to frequent - and often unfair - personal criticism. ”The more she is attacked the more she gains in popularity,” says one respondent. ”It is almost as if voters want to protect her.” ”It’s like the talk about women drivers: ’A woman at the wheel is death at the crossroads.’ Yet I’ve read the insurance statistics which show that women have many fewer accidents than men,” says another.

Nonetheless, Royal is fiercely criticised for being a gaffe-prone, insubstantial political lightweight, typical of the ”gauche caviar”, that elite-educated, bohemian Parisian crowd that claims to speak in the name of the workers while fiddling the values of their second homes to reduce their wealth tax. ”Segolene is candyfloss: pink, sugary, and full of air. People are going to discover that she leaves nothing in the mouth.”

The book highlights three other striking features about the French electorate: how many voters detest the Socialist party, how little regard they have for the entire political class, and how they are becoming increasingly individualistic and self-reliant. ”French socialism is hypocritical: you leave lots of people in the shit and allow others to stuff themselves under the pretext of studying and status. There are too many privileges and not enough action,” says Steff M, a 31-year-old tattoo artist. Remi, 36, a municipal worker, says: ”I have chosen my job, my girlfriend, my friends, my housing, my hobbies, my holidays. Segolene or Sarko aren’t going to change any of that.”

The dissatisfaction with the two main candidates has seemingly opened the way for other candidates - such as Jean-Marie Le Pen, the leader of the National Front, and Francois Bayrou, the candidate of the ”extreme centre” - to stake their own claims to the presidency. While Sarko scares, and Sego unnerves, Bayrou soothes. In emollient prose, Bayrou, the surprise package of this election campaign, sketches out his own vision for France in Projet D’Espoir. The leader of the centrist UDF party explains that he is outlining a ”project of hope” rather than a ”programme” because he wants to change the entire political system rather than just tinker with it.

A former farmer and education minister, Bayrou presents himself as an unthreatening voice of sweet reason deeply attached to France’s rural traditions and universal values. The reader can scarcely disagree with a single sentence, so uncontentious is Bayrou’s thinking. Yet one test of a serious proposition is that one can reasonably argue its opposite. So, for example, one can either support free trade or oppose it. But is there anyone in France who rejects the values of liberty, equality and fraternity? Who (apart from computer-games retailers) would disagree with the idea that children should read more books? And hands up all those in favour of the genocide in Darfur? Women are the future of our society, Bayrou primly declares. Well, it’s certainly difficult to imagine a future society without them. By the end of Bayrou’s book the weary reader is more tempted to slap the author than vote for him.

One of the candidate’s few well-directed hits, which he uses to great effect on the campaign trail, is that the state is omnipresent where it is least needed and absent where it is most desperately required. Bayrou proposes to spread the state more evenly across the country, like so much butter on a warm piece of toast. Police officers should be redeployed from the rich leafy suburbs of Neuilly-sur-Seine and start patrolling the rough urban ghettoes that exploded in rioting in 2005.

However, Bayrou’s other big idea seems badly conceived and poorly explained. Rightly, he criticises governments of both right and left over the past 25 years for piling up public debt rather than tacking the country’s structural deficiencies. Yet his proposal to introduce a constitutional rule banning governments from running unbalanced budgets seems daft. He is also wrong to suggest that the UK and Germany already have such a constitutional rule. Indeed, Britain does not even have a constitution.

Bayrou’s book hardly provides much confidence that he is the leader to refashion France in such a radical way as he deems necessary. Still, if Perrineau is right about the banalisation of French politics then Bayrou may be just the man for the hour.

John Thornhill is the FT’s European editor.

Atlas Electoral
by Pascal Perrineau
Sciences Po Les Presses €19, 140 pages

Testimony
by Nicolas Sarkozy
Harriman House ₤16.99, 224 pages
FT bookshop price: ₤13.59

Maintenant
by Ségolène Royal with Marie-Francoise Colombani
Hachette Litteratures €18, 331 pages

Ségolène vue par les Francais
by Roger Lenglet
Editions Pascal €9.95, 144 pages

Projet d’espoir
by Francois Bayrou
Plon €17, 196 pages