AN EMAIL has just pinged into my mailbox. There are none of the usual polite expressions of good will and hopes that all is well.

Instead it is a hurting, solid paragraph from a friend on America’s East Coast who also has a house nearby.

In essence it’s a cry of despair at what has happened.

I check the clock – it is 9.31pm in France and many hours since I watched President Elect Trump play at humility.

A Democrat she had woken to the sickening knowledge that all had changed.

In France, in a sitting room under beams looted from a fine house following the French revolution, I had watched through most of the night as a prancing, lying, misogynistic, bully-boy reality star became the most powerful man in the world.

My friend is due to return to her house here in a couple of months for several weeks.

"We’ll see where we stand then," she writes. "Maybe we’ll stay."

My reply to her is equally bleak.

"I’d love you to stay here but I fear there will be nowhere safe soon."

Melodramatic? Overreaction? Possibly but that is not how it feels tonight.

Perhaps, as your ears and eyes are not drawn to France, you missed the statement released by Front National Deputy Florian Phillipot:

"Their world is crumbling, ours is being built," he said as Hillary Clinton conceded defeat.

‘Their’ world, ‘a new movement’ as Trump put it. Chilling in its suggestion of right wing thought and ‘principles’ spreading its hatred throughout the world.

It was telling that practically the first calls of congratulation to Trump came from Russian president Putin and FN leader Marine Le Pen.

The UK’s Nigel Farage was almost prostrate with delight, teeing himself up as a future US Brexit ambassador to Europe.

On French Television Le Pen gave the rallying cry: "Today, the United States, tomorrow France," her joy evident in every interview.

For with the UK’s disastrous decision to leave the EU and now the presence of an ignorant, politically naive hardliner in the White House, Le Pen and others of her kind have been given validation.

And like dominoes lined up in an elaborate showpiece, European countries could fall one by one and return to the closed borders and mutual, dangerous distrust as proposed by Len Pen.

Her mantra is: The time of the nation state has come again.

It will increasingly be heard as she continues her election tour of a country sickened by President Hollande but finding little appeal in any would-be contenders.

As in the US elections, French elections are a lengthy, drawn-out, country-crisscrossing run-up to run-offs.

As in America, candidates have to appeal to a broad church of potential voters; far broader than the UK’s seemingly relatively simpler divide. Seemingly.

The difference I suggest is further locked within our state of emergency and our shaky empathy with fellow, border linked countries, now fearing more ‘spectacles’ as IS loses its land bases.

We feel linked, as in a dartboard, awaiting the arrows.

If Trump – the man who in a tweet recently placed Paris in Germany – had lost, there would have been a collective sigh of relief in the governments.

At least Hillary Clinton had dealt before with the complexities of our member states and has need of the centre to hold if Putin is to be held.

Now we are dealing with the unknown and for the first time both politicians and media are warning we face the real and horrifying prospect of a President Marine Le Pen.

Normally, barring war and conquest, the French remain cynical in their selfishness and draw back from stepping into the abyss. Or at best they bend with the wind of change.

Now that the wind has thrust Trump to the presidency then all of Europe is at risk of following the Pied Piper path to the self-determination that, paradoxically, created the EU and peace.

There once was a man like Trump in France. Well, a cleverer version in a sense, but cut from the same cloth and with the same appeal.

He was Pierre Poujade, the first demagogue of the postwar era.

His party won 2.4 million votes in the 1956 election, giving it 52 parliamentary seats.

A brilliant speaker he attracted thousands to his rallies and in a different era, like now, could have been France’s President.

It was as if nothing, nothing had been learned from two world wars and their devastating impact on the country.

He wanted to expel Jews to Israel and his words such as ‘freeloaders,’ ‘the silent majority,’ ‘the vampire state’ and a ‘different kind of politics’ resonated as they do now.

Fortunately, after a brief strut upon the stage, he was sidelined into obscurity.

I confess he was only a vague name in my modern French history, and on looking him up, found it quite incredible the votes he garnered so soon after the war.

He is now a mere footnote in history. One would wish the same for Le Pen but after Trump’s take-over anything is possible now.

Even a President Le Pen. As I told my friend, nowhere is safe any longer.