The French were once solid supporters of greater unity across the continent, dismissing euro-skepticism as an annoying eccentricity of their neighbors on the other side of the English Channel.
Not anymore.
Just 39 percent of French voters now think the EU is "a good thing," according to a poll published Monday by daily newspaper Le Monde.
Here too, Henin-Beaumont was ahead of the national curve.
In 2005, 75 percent voted "no" in a referendum on a treaty designed to give more powers to the EU, compared to 54 percent nationally.
"Europe is really not popular here," says Christophe Le Couteux, a journalist with the regional newspaper La Voix du Nord. "There's a feeling that Europe does not defend jobs, that Europe supports neo-liberalism, that it favors factory closures. Europe is detached from people's lives."
Factory closures in the early 2000s were partly blamed on EU laws allowing companies to relocate to countries with cheaper labor costs.
More recently, the EU has come in for criticism here and across southern Europe for imposing austerity programs demanded by Germany and other northern countries in exchange for bailout programs.
Conversely, euro-skepticism in the north has been fueled by populist parties claiming taxpayers' cash is diverted to support spendthrift southerners.
With France straddling Europe's north-south divide, Le Pen has been able to exploit both arguments to ride a wave of anti-European feeling.
"Europe has brought nothing good, there's more unemployment, everything is more expensive," says Evelyne, a retired accountant in Henin-Beaumont who declined to give her full name. "We were better off how we were before."
Le Pen is calling for a break up of the euro currency, a drastic reduction of powers for EU headquarters in Brussels and an end to policies allowing Europeans to travel and work freely across the bloc.
He says negotiations with the US on a trans-Atlantic free trade area should be abandoned and trade barriers against other European nations re-introduced in the name of "economic patriotism."
Northern rightists may not be as gung-ho as Le Pen on economic protectionism, but they agree with her on the need to roll back the EU's powers. Some want to break up the EU, which was founded in the 1950s with the goal of uniting countries whose 20th-century rivalries twice led the world into war.
Ending EU labor movement rules has been a rallying call for the nationalist right from Italy to Denmark since the bloc expanded a decade ago to include the former communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe.
Le Pen's election material complains the EU "forbids us from mastering our own frontiers and stopping massive immigration."
In Britain, the UK Independence Party, which is topping polls, has refused to join a coalition of European far right-wing parties being put together by Le Pen and Dutch Freedom Party leader Geert Wilders, claiming they are racist.
But UKIP is running a campaign associating Eastern European migrants with unemployment, crime and benefits abuse.
"Any normal and fair-minded person would have a perfect right to be concerned if a group of Romanian people suddenly moved in next door," UKIP leader Nigel Farage said in a statement Saturday.
Le Pen has also sought to refute accusations of racism and authoritarianism against the National Front in an effort to make the party more respectable to middle-of-the-road voters.
However, critics point to the actions of party mayors after their capture of 11 town halls in local elections in March.
In Henin-Beaumont, Mayor Steeve Briois quickly moved to evict the local branch of France's Human Rights League from municipal property.
One of the first acts of Mayor Franck Briffaut in Villers-Cotterets, an agricultural town northeast of Paris, was to terminate municipal support for an annual commemoration of the end of slavery, saying it encouraged "fashionable guilt" over France's colonial history.
The event was held in honor of Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, a general in Napoleon's army whose mother was a Haitian slave. Dumas' son, The Three Musketeers author Alexandre Dumas, was born in Villers-Cotterets.
If polls are correct, radical right-wing parties are likely to grab around 90 of the 766 seats contested in the European Parliament elections.
