Gavin Hewitt

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The success of Marine Le Pen and the National Front (FN) in France underlines the shifting plates of European politics.

She is far right, anti-Europe and anti-immigration, but many of those who voted for her once voted for the Communists and the Socialists.

She has attempted to reinvent the FN as the party of the voiceless, the left-behind and the angry.

She offers to protect workers' jobs from globalisation and to defend French identity. Her appeal is to a working class that feels disenfranchised.

The centre-right or the conservative right wants to take and hold the middle ground.

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An unwinding rarely has a start date. It settles in over time. It is an erosion, deceptive, slow at first, and then it is all around you; old certainties crumbling; the believer's glint dulled; the claim on destiny weakened.

In just a matter of months, the idea of Europe has been unwinding, buffeted by successive crises; the Greek drama, the columns of migrants; the terror attacks.

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Europe's open borders were already under strain from the refugee crisis. After the attacks in Paris there are increasing doubts about whether they can survive without being reinforced.

Firstly - and not unexpectedly - the far right has used the crisis to challenge Europe's passport-free zone as guaranteed by the Schengen agreement. Marine Le Pen, the leader of the National Front in France, called passport-free travel "madness" and insisted: "We have to reinstate our national borders."

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France is entering three days of mourning.

The President of the French Republic Francois Hollande has described the attacks as "an act of war against France".

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The shadow boxing is over.

On Tuesday, David Cameron will send a letter to Donald Tusk, the President of the European Council.

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In Ankara, supporters of the ruling AKP party savoured their political victory into the night.

They sang, waved party flags, banged drums, hooted their car horns and thanked God.

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In politics you can sometimes gauge the level of panic and fear by the speed with which previously held principles are set aside.

So with the migrant crisis.

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The conflict in Syria is leaving its mark on the streets of Europe. Tens of thousands of the refugees arriving in Europe's capitals are fleeing the Syrian conflict - yet Europe does not have an agreed policy for dealing with the crisis and risks becoming a bystander.

It is a charge made by the leader of the Liberal group in the European Parliament, Guy Verhofstadt. "We need a common European strategy to end the war in Syria. We're being pushed out," he says.

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In the capitals of Europe and in Brussels, there is frustration at what they see as British shadow-boxing.

A renegotiation of Britain's membership of the EU is under way - or so they are told - but they don't know what the government at Westminster really wants.

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Germany, for so long criticised as the author of austerity, is being lavished with praise.

Over the migrant crisis, it has demonstrated not just moral leadership, the German people have shown great acts of kindness to the refugees.