On the east side of Savigny sur Orge is a typically quaint French village with its stone houses, its well-mown lawns, its patisserie and its two greengrocers.

On the west side is Le Grand Vaux housing estate – separated from the village by a few hundred metres and a yawning social chasm.

“It’s a ghetto here,” said Rick, a 26-year-old building worker standing at the foot of a grey, 12-storey tower on the suburban estate south of Paris. “And if Sarkozy is elected, it’s going to get worse.” Rick and his friends had gathered yesterday in the forecourt of what they described as Le Grand Vaux’s shopping centre – a cheap supermarket, Le Fontenoy Bar, a baker’s and a butcher’s – and they were discussing the presidential election.

Or rather, they were discussing Nicolas Sarkozy, whom they reviled as the champion of hostile forces ranged from the white home-owners opposite to the US and Israel.

“When he was Interior Minister, he had the police on our backs all the time and that’s why there have been so many riots,” said Rick, a tall, broad-shouldered immigrant from West Africa with a beard, a blue baseball cap and white trainers.

“Can you imagine what he’d be like as president? There’d be no stopping him – more police, more arrests and more riots. I’m telling you, it’s going to be hot if he gets in.”

A couple of youths, both born in France into families that had immigrated from Algeria, drew up in a dented green Opel Astra. “There’ll be civil war under Sarkozy,” said the first. “He’s pro-American, he’s Bush’s poodle.” “He’s against us and he’s against Palestine because he’s a Jew,” said the second.

The assertion is false – Mr Sarkozy’s maternal grandfather was a Jew who converted to Catholicism – but it is symptomatic of the myths that circulate on estates cut off from the rest of France.

With unemployment more than double the national average of 8.3 per cent, radical Islam gaining ground, and few residents able to cross the boundary into the middle classes, a siege mentality has grown in places such as Le Grand Vaux.

Seen from here, Mr Sarkozy represents the enemy – particularly after he pledged in 2005 to wash down French council estates with a Karcher, the German-made high-pressure hose.

Like most of the black and Arab residents voicing opinions on Le Grand Vaux yesterday, Mathieu Flower, 29, said he had voted for the Socialist, Ségolène Royal, although not with any great enthusiasm.

“I’m not very keen on either of them,” he said. “It’s a choice between the plague and cholera, but in the end I think Ségolène Royal is closer to what I believe in.”

On the other side of town, emerging from the patisserie with a baguette and a cake, Thierry Mirbeau, 42, had an altogether different view. “[Sarkozy] calls a spade a spade and he wants to put a stop to all the illusions that we’ve had in France. The key is putting the country back to work.”

Times Recommends

• Michael Jackson: Not the final chapter
• Indian Army spends10m rupees on golf buggies
• Brüno toned down for 15 rating