Futures contracts — basically, agreements between one investor and another to buy or sell a product at a specified price and date — give investors an opportunity to spread out their risk by allowing them to hedge trades. They generally make the market in that asset more liquid, which should help that market, in this case, French debt.

That this futures contract was born in Germany — unsurprising, since Frankfurt-based derivatives exchange Eurex is the largest in Europe — elicited nationalistic chest-beating against outside interference.

Add into the mix that it started trading Monday, just days before the first round of France’s presidential election, and you have a wave of “Wag the Dog” conspiracy theories that President Nicolas Sarkozy was soliciting instability in order to press home the message that the country needs a firm, experienced hand on the tiller.

The idea that either the French or German governments must have had a hand in launching the futures contract kept cropping up. Socialist candidate Francois Hollande, who is leading most polls, even said he would ask German authorities to ban the instrument. Germany’s financial regulator says it has no such power.

Finance Minister Francois Baroin was finally forced to put out a statement saying that the “decision by a private, foreign operator to launch a derivative contract on French debt does not require the prior authorization of a French or European regulatory authority.”

It may have seemed an obvious point, but one that many here found hard to believe.

In reality, the futures contract appears to have had little effect on France’s cost of borrowing and volumes remain very low. And it is hardly a radical product; similar ones already exist on Eurex for German and Italian debt.

In France, a politician can say he doesn’t like rich people and is in a battle with the world of finance — and be on track to become the next president. That’s Hollande, who is the least radical of the five leftist candidates.

All five want to raise taxes, including some who would confiscate all income above a certain level. One wants to unilaterally cancel France’s debt. Two would ban layoffs.

Even the far-right candidate, Marine Le Pen, is calling for an across-the-board raise for workers making near the minimum wage. Not to be left out, conservative Sarkozy has hammered companies on executive pay and has declared that France’s calling is to be the “spokesman for all in the world who wish to see that man is not sacrificed to commerce.”

Market-bashing in France is often an easy option for politicians, an uncontroversial way to please a crowd of any political stripe.

Perhaps because they are so often painted as bogeymen, markets appear to be widely misunderstood in France. The debate over the new futures contract revived two contradictory beliefs: One, that markets are tyrannical forces that must be kept at bay. Two, that free markets don’t really exist — that the state always has a heavy manipulating hand in them.

The reality, of course, is that France is a major, modern country that needs — and makes ample use of — the markets to fuel its economy. Hollande opened himself to ridicule from the right when, in the middle of the brouhaha, he declared that there would be “no place” for markets in his administration and that the French people would not allow a “dictate from outside” to be imposed on them.

Sarkozy quickly mocked these statements as an utter misapprehension of the real world, but he also evoked one in which France could live outside of the demands of the markets.

“If you don’t want take notice of the markets, pay down your debt, reduce your deficit and you won’t need someone to come to lend you money,” he said.

It’s true that countries with high debts and deficits are more at the mercy of investors, who can demand premiums to lend to them thus making it harder and harder to pay back the debt. But all modern economies issue bonds — which are essentially debt — to raise money. While France has seen the amount it has to pay to borrow money rise slightly recently, it still pays a relatively low rate of around 3 percent.

That has allowed it to even make money on some of its debt, by turning around and lending to banks at higher rates, analyst Marc Touati noted this week.

Touati himself has ridiculed the fear of markets and the facile way in which politicians describe them as “attacking” France and even its democracy.

“We must remember that it’s not the markets, not the speculators that asked the French state to inordinately increase its spending, its deficit, its debt. No, France arrived at this point because its political leaders decided these things,” he said in a weekly note addressing the question — frequently thrown around in French media — of whether the markets would attack France if Hollande wins.

Touati, who is the chief economist at investment company Assya, says markets may turn on France regardless of who wins, if the next president doesn’t slash spending and overhaul the economy.

“Thus, it’s not the markets that will attack France, but the French who risk fashioning a baton so they can be hit on the head,” he said.

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Associated Press writer David McHugh contributed to this report from Frankfurt.

In a conference call to analysts and reporters last week, Total Chief Financial Officer Patrick de La Chevardiere appealed to those listening to avoid comparisons between the Elgin leak and the Gulf spill at BP’s Macondo well.

“While we understand that comparisons to Macondo are inevitable, we would like to state clearly that the situations are very different,” he said. “There is no crude oil involved here and therefore the current impact on and risks for the environment are relatively low.”

The Elgin leak is also on a smaller scale, according to George Hirasaki, a chemical engineering professor at Rice University in Texas who has worked in the oil industry. “It’s more of a very dangerous situation rather than a disaster so they may be able to get it back under control with minimal losses,” he said.

Total moved to dispel fears of an explosion or any long-lasting environmental damage, saying that gas is dissipating quickly. A spokesman for the company said Thursday that about 40 cubic feet (1.2 cubic meters) of gas condensate remains in the water. He spoke on condition of anonymity, citing policy.

Environmental activist group Greenpeace, however, has sent a boat to the area to take air and water samples. It said its tests would reveal in the coming days whether it considers whether the leak will cause damage to the environment or wildlife in the area. In the meantime, the group did note that the gas escaping is mostly methane, which is “20 times more dangerous for the climate than CO2 (carbon dioxide).”

During the Gulf spill, roughly 200 million gallons (780 million liters) of oil spewed from the blown-out well. The spill affected sensitive tidal estuaries and beaches, killed wildlife and closed vast areas of the Gulf to commercial fishing for months.

The disaster cost BP chief executive Tony Hayward his job after a series of public relations gaffes and derailed the company’s attempt to create an environmentally friendly image. BP has been hit with several lawsuits, which will likely cost it tens of billions of dollars to resolve.

To pay for the cleanup and claims, BP was forced to cut its dividend, borrow money and sell off tens of billions of dollars in assets. The company’s share price is still some 30 percent below its 6.55 pound ($10.39) close before the spill on April 20, 2010.

Total, however, is so confident that the leak will have minimal environmental impact that de La Chevardiere spent most of a recent call with analysts and journalists discussing the financial consequences. Those, too, he said, are manageable.

Still, it’s unclear how quickly Total will be able to stop the leak. It is currently trying to get a team back on the platform to attempt to plug the leak by pumping in mud. On Thursday, a handful of experts landed on the platform for a few hours to gather data on the leak and figure out if it was safe to begin trying to plug it.

Total is also preparing to drill relief wells, in case that first method doesn’t work.

Drilling relief wells is an expensive and a fairly long process. When asked whether an estimate of six months was reasonable on the analyst call, Michel Hourcard, the director of development for Total’s exploration and production arm, said it was.

Currently, the cost of the response is around $1 million per day, said de La Chevardiere. If relief wells are needed, the costs will rise to $1.5 million per day, while they’re being drilled.

Added to those costs is the loss of production. The current impact on the company’s net operating income is about $1.5 million per day, he said. That’s a small fraction of the $16 billion in net operating income the company reported last year, and ratings agencies have indicated they are not concerned.

It’s also nowhere near the around $40 billion BP has estimated the 85-day Gulf spill cost them, including response and compensation. Those costs are in flux because not all litigation has been resolved.

“Even in the event of the shutdown of the whole Elgin field, Fitch believes Total is likely to retain its ‘AA’ credit rating as it has the cash resources to more than cover any associated costs,” Fitch said in a statement a few days into the leak. “These sorts of accidents are often difficult to resolve and unpredictable; nonetheless, in our view the potential is low for this leak to escalate to a crisis on the scale of Deepwater Horizon.”

But, as de La Chevardiere noted, the comparisons are almost irresistible.

“The comparison (with the Gulf spill) now is wholly unavoidable, just as for BP and the Deepwater Horizon spill, the comparison with Exxon Valdez was unavoidable,” said Gene Grabowski, a senior vice president with Levick Strategic Communications, which advises clients on communicating in a crisis. “We have a new standard by which all leaks will be measured.”

But that doesn’t mean that the mere invocation of BP sullies Total’s reputation. Grabowski said that if the environmental damage is limited, then he expected the long-term impact of the spill to be fairly muted.

Eric Smith, the associate director of the Energy Institute at Tulane University in Louisiana, said the company appeared to have learned one lesson from BP: that less information is better. He pointed to the fact that industry experts had expected most of the ways BP tried to plug its leak would fail; that’s simply how disaster-response works. You try everything, and all you need is one solution.

“The problem with too much transparency when you’re in the middle of a situation like that is you know there are going to be failures,” he said. “The one lesson everybody learned (from the Gulf spill) is to turn the TV cameras off.”

In the Gulf, an underwater camera showed oil gushing out of the well in real time. Media tracked the spread of a slick that took days to reach shore. And photos of sea birds covered in oil drove home the damage.

By contrast, photos of the Total rig initially showed a small flame. That raised concern of an explosion but has since gone out, and now the rig looks fairly normal, at least to layman’s eyes.

“As long as they don’t make any ridiculous statement, they’re going to benefit from the fact that there are no good pictures for this and that the environmental impact is unclear and that the constant glare of the U.S. media is not on this,” Grabowski said.

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Associated Press writer Robert Barr contributed to this report from London.

As much as France likes the plan, it does not seem to have assured Hollande’s victory, which, just three weeks before the first round of voting, is growing more uncertain as Sarkozy reaps the benefits of projecting presidential mettle following France’s shooting attacks.

Polls put the two men neck-and-neck in the first round April 22, and show Sarkozy gaining on Hollande for the decisive runoff May 6.

Centrist candidate Francois Bayrou has dismissed the plan as absurd — contending that when all was added up, the top bracket would be taxed at nearly 100 percent. Many economists are also scratching their heads over the tax — seeing it as dangerous at worst and ineffective at best — and even Hollande admits it’s not meant to balance the budget.

Still, the “Fouquet’s tax” — so named by some in the press after the tony restaurant where Sarkozy celebrated his 2007 presidential win — is riding and in part fueling a resurgence of the French left. The tax-the-rich proposal has garnered as much as 65 percent approval in some polls.

All that has helped Hollande, often perceived as amiable but uninspiring, to distinguish himself from his main opponent, said Jean-Daniel Levy, a pollster and political analyst.

“Nicolas Sarkozy has a double difficulty: On the one hand, he is perceived as a president who is close to the rich, which is not a good sign in France. And he is also seen as a president who oversaw inegalitarian policies,” he said. The tax, he added, “allows Francois Hollande to take control again and to paint a negative portrait of Nicolas Sarkozy.”

But there is a danger that Hollande hit the nerve too well.

Many voters have swept right past Hollande and into the camp of far-left candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon, who has electrified voters with calls for a new French revolution and who some polls say will come in third or fourth in the first round of elections. That could bleed support away from Hollande in the first round, depriving him of crucial momentum going into the second one.

Antipathy for the rich is widespread in France, where wealth is meant to be discreet and climbing the social ladder to build yourself a mansion isn’t a common narrative.

Hollande himself once famously declared “I do not like the rich” — a statement that only boosted his political standing among those who think wealth should be redistributed instead of accumulated.

Following his 75-percent tax announcement, front pages treated the rich like some strange, migrating species, declaring that they would decamp to Belgium if the tax was put in place. One presidential candidate, Dominique de Villepin, himself quite wealthy, warned France not to “kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.”

While there is some anecdotal evidence to suggest the wealthy are eyeing the border, tax lawyer Sandra Hazan said there’s nothing new in rich people fleeing France. But they don’t pull up the stakes simply because taxes are high.

“The problem is not the level of taxation you suffer,” said Hazan, who heads the tax department at law firm Salans. “The problem is when you cannot anticipate how much you will be paying.”

The French tax code has long been unpredictable, she said, but it has become even more so in recent months. As Sarkozy’s administration has tried to keep a series of budget targets that are central to his credibility and reassure markets that France can manage its debt, the number of changes to tax law have come fast and furious.

When he put taxes at the center of his campaign, Hollande unleashed a new flood of tax proposals, creating more uncertainty. Sarkozy, too, has vowed to hunt down French people who have fled the country purely to escape high taxes and make them pay the difference between what they’re paying in their haven and what they would have to pay in France.

In all the discussion about how much the rich make and how much they should pay, Sarkozy has also been put on the spot — again — about a lavish party to celebrate his presidential victory at Fouquet’s and a vacation on a friend’s yacht he took shortly after. These moves quickly earned him the moniker “President Bling Bling,” and he has struggled ever since to shed the image of a man too comfortable with money.

Five years after the victory party and the yacht trip, Sarkozy is still fielding questions about them. He most recently defended the vacation in an interview not long after Hollande’s proposal when he called it a last-ditch attempt to save his marriage to Cecilia, whom he divorced not long after taking office.

But Hollande has struggled to harness this momentum.

Hollande bungled the announcement of his new tax, initially saying it would apply to households bringing in more than €1 million — about $1.33 million — a month, before clarifying he meant an individual’s annual revenue.

He has also failed to provide a coherent narrative for why the tax is needed. He started out by saying that, in tough times, the rich had to pay their fair share, before later conceding it would only bring in about €100 million to €300 million each year. France’s public debt is €1.7 trillion ($2.3 trillion).

Then he said it would put pressure on companies to lower ballooning salaries, noting that that executive pay for France’s 40 largest public companies — the ones that make up its CAC-40 stock index — rose 34 percent in 2010, while most of Europe was fighting for its very existence.

In the end, Hollande has settled on casting the tax as simply the right thing to do.

“It’s not a question of return,” he told RTL radio station. “It’s a question of morality.”

“In these videos, he says, ‘I am innocent. Why are you killing me? I didn’t do anything,’” she said.

Mokhtari would not detail how she got the videos, saying she would reveal more on their origin once she files a lawsuit in French courts against the elite police force, RAID, that killed Merah.

A police official with knowledge of the investigation cast doubt on her claims Monday, noting that Merah led police to evidence that proved he was the perpetrator.

Prosecutors say Merah spoke at length with negotiators from the RAID force throughout the long standoff last month while he was holed up in a Toulouse apartment.

During these conversations, authorities say, Merah told them where to find a video he took of the crime spree. Al-Jazeera television has said it received a copy of the video, which shows the deaths of three paratroopers, three Jewish children and a rabbi from the killer’s point of view.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of police rules, added that Merah had toyed with police during the standoff, initially agreeing to surrender but later vowing to “die with his weapons in his hands.”

Police have said that Merah said he had links to al-Qaida but have cast doubt on that claim. They are holding his brother on suspicion he helped to prepare the attacks and are looking for a possible third man who may also have been involved.

The killings have left France reeling, reviving worries about Islamist extremism and shaking up the French presidential campaign.

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Associated Press writer Jamey Keaten contributed to this report.