KEY POINTS:
The four women and eight men battling to become France's next President have their sights on a job that offers grandeur almost worthy of the Sun King and political powers that would stir the envy of autocrats around the world.
The French head of state is ensconced in
the Elysee in Paris' fashionable Rue du Faubourg Saint Honore - a palace named after Elysium, the resting place for heroes and warriors in classical mythology.
Grand name, grand place. The President enters his home through a triumphal arch and into a courtyard, where Republican Guards, with plumed, polished helmets, knee-high boots and azure uniforms, present their sabres in a juddering salute.
Inside, the decor is the finest profusion of gilt and paintings that 18th-century France can offer; fine cuisine and wines, and for company, silver-tongued civil servants, handpicked advisers and fawning politicians.
If the President ever gets bored with all this, he can go off to five other official residences - the Hotel Marigny, a 19th century townhouse just up the road from the Elysee; the Bregancon Fort on its own island off the Mediterranean Riviera; the 14th century Rambouillet Chateau west of Paris with its own hunting grounds; the manor house at Souzy-la-Briche; or the smaller Pavillon at Marly near Versailles that Louis XIV had built to escape the stifling etiquette of court.
The cost of the presidency is eye-watering: more than €1.9 million ($3.5 million) a week. Under Jacques Chirac, who officially leaves office on May 16, the Elysee's budget soared by almost 800 per cent between 1995 and 2006 - a rise that has prompted Socialist challenger Segolene Royal to declare it is time to "end this monarchical drift".
Charles de Gaulle, Valery Giscard d'Estaing and Chirac all took to the milieu of the Elysee with the swiftness of a pig scenting truffles, and once installed they never uttered a word about cutting costs.
Francois Mitterrand, a Socialist, was the most blatant hypocrite of all. He who had railed at the aloofness of the presidency while in opposition became so distant during his 14 years in the Elysee that France's top cartoonist, Plantu of Le Monde, lampooned him as God - a disembodied voice making sibylline utterances from beyond the clouds.
The good life is only a part of the allure, though.
Behind these walls, policy can be made at a whim and there is no outraged legislature to demand the President's eviction.
The constitution of the Fifth Republic makes France's head of state arguably the most powerful person on earth. He can dissolve Parliament, appoint and sack prime ministers, determine foreign and defence policy and launch a nuclear strike. The President can veto legislation passed by Parliament and pardon any criminal. And because the President appoints ministers, through the Interior Minister he has control of the secret services and through the
Justice Minister can also subtly influence the outcome of judicial investigations.
From the outside, these powers may seem outlandish.
They should certainly be more than enough for any new President to push through the most ambitious agenda.
If elected, Royal wants to enforce her "100 ideas for restoring a shared ambition, pride and fraternity to France". Modernising conservative Nicolas Sarkozy promises to make the French a country of entrepreneurs; and third man centrist Francois Bayrou vows to bridge the "prehistoric" left-right divide.
In fact, the next President, to be elected on May 6 if nobody garners at least 50 per cent of the vote on Sunday, will be weaker than any of his predecessors. European integration means French laws must conform to European directives, or European Union-wide laws to which France has given its agreement.
On the financial front, France no longer controls national interest rates, an affair for the European Central Bank, which is the master of the euro. On the economy, takeovers, monopolies and many kinds of national subsidies are closely scrutinised by the European Commission in Brussels.
Another, unspoken, bond on presidential power is popular opinion. In other democracies, this is usually conveyed through the press; in France it is expressed on the street.
Since the 1789 revolution, massive protests have thwarted change and brought down French Governments - and it is a lesson every candidate for the Elysee quietly takes to heart.
