QUAINT, discreet and perfectly manicured, Marnes-la-Coquette has 1,700 residents, including scores of millionaires, who backed the right-wing President Nicolas Sarkozy in the last presidential election. Surrounded by parkland, the village nudges the leafy suburbs west of Paris favoured by bankers, ageing pop stars and aristocratic families dubbed ‘the heirs’.

These super-wealthy could soon have more reason than ever to hide behind a parapet. “There’s a taboo about money and success in this country. One must be discreet about one’s wealth,” whispered a well-dressed grandmother, clutching her handbag. Squeezing the rich, banker-bashing and hammering the boss class have become focal points in a bruising French presidential election campaign. France, whether harking back to its revolution, or simply seething with rage at the injustices exposed by the financial crisis, now wants to lead the world in clobbering the mega-rich. If the left wins, France could become the country with the highest tax on the rich in the EU, and one of the most punishing in the world.

François Hollande, the Socialist frontrunner who polls say would win the second-round vote in May, has promised a 75 per cent tax bracket on earnings after one million euros. More than six out of 10 French people approve. Jean-Luc Melenchon, the fire-brand leftist backed by the Communist party, has surged to third place in the polls with his promise to cap fat-cat salaries at 360,000 euros, after which income tax would be 100 per cent and the state would ‘take it all’.

Even Sarkozy, known as ‘president of the rich’ for his generous tax breaks for the wealthy, has restyled himself as ‘president of the people’, offering to cut tax loopholes and make French tax exiles who flee abroad pay back the difference to the French state.

The French people are more distrustful of capitalism than the Chinese, polls show. Two-thirds agree with the idea that the state should take from the rich to give to the poor. But many question whether the election rhetoric will succeed in rooting out a deeply unfair system where the super-rich often manage to pay barely any tax at all, hiring top accountants to pick through the myriad legal loopholes in their favour.

France is still seething at the L’Oreal cosmetics heiress, Liliane Bettencourt, France’s richest woman, who lives in a mansion lined with Matisse paintings where her dogs eat only fresh fish, yet who got a 30 million euros tax rebate from the state a few years back. A judge is investigating whether her household gave brown envelopes of cash to Sarkozy’s party for illegal election funding in 2007.

Hollande, who once famously announced “I don’t like the rich”, said making the wealthy pay more tax was “patriotism”. Forced to admit that the 75 per cent tax on people who earn over one million euros would affect only a few thousand people and not bring in great amounts to state coffers, he said: “It’s not a question of return, it’s a question of morality.” High tax would deter businesses from handing out fat-cat salaries, he argued.

The left would love to restyle France as a world champion against the greed and ravages of the Anglo-American system of brutal finance. — The Guardian, London