FREJUS France (Reuters) - Last month, David Rachline, the mayor of the French Riviera town of Frejus, quietly loaned a free room to the town’s Jewish community to celebrate Yom Kippur.

In most other towns in France the gesture would have been unremarkable. But Rachline belongs to the far right National Front, a party whose founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen, was convicted of inciting racial hatred in 1996 when he said the gas chambers used to kill Jews in the Holocaust were "merely a detail” of World War Two.