PARIS: At an outdoor rally just days before the French are to cast their ballots for president, Ségolène Royal, the Socialist candidate, came with a special message.

"I want to address myself to the women," Royal declared in the town of Achicourt in northern France on Sunday. "I need the women's vote."

She called on women to write "a new page in the history of France" by making her the first country's female president. "The entire world is watching you," she told them.

While Royal's plea is revolutionary, it could backfire. The wooing of women voters as women is alien to republican France, where all citizens - and voters - are supposed to be treated as equals and where gender, race, ethnicity and religion are supposed to be ignored.

The move has been seen by some as an ill-advised, even desperate ploy on the part of the 53-year-old candidate to win votes in the first round of the election four days from now by stressing gender over competence.

"It's the wrong strategy, totally counterproductive," said Michèle Fitoussi, one of France's leading social commentators and a columnist at French Elle magazine. "Women are going to vote for Ségolène because they believe she's most qualified to be president, not because she's a woman. It's an insult to our intelligence to ask us to do such a thing."

Nicolas Sarkozy, the front-runner and the conservative candidate, has taken the opposite approach. Asked at a conference organized by Elle earlier this month whether women were important for him, he replied that he had no particular message for them.

"What's important is to speak to all citizens," he said, adding, "A president of the republic is the man of the nation, not a man of a party, not a man of a sect."

In theory, the French have no problem with the idea of a woman president. The polling institute IFOP reported as early as January 2006 that 94 percent of the French believed that a woman was qualified to be president, compared with 52 percent in 1972.

Certainly, the women's vote is crucial for both the contest Sunday and the run-off two weeks later: women represent 53 percent of the electorate.

Royal has campaigned on a classic Socialist economic platform with strong protections for workers while stressing traditional social and family values. In her appearance on Sunday, she told women they could make up for past injustices against women by voting for her.

"I'm told that for certain women, it's too revolutionary to see the state and the nation personified by a woman," Royal said. "But I say to them as well that it is time to put an end to centuries of injustice, of marginalization. It is time to put an end to prejudices that make no sense."

Royal's call for female solidarity is at somewhat at variance with the dominant message of her campaign: that she will be a nurturing, un-threatening mother-protector for all Frenchmen.

In a prepared radio and television address that has been aired since the start of the official campaign last week, Royal opened her remarks with the words: "I am a woman, a mother of four children. I have my feet on the ground. I'm a practical person. I am a free woman."

On Wednesday, she toured a supermarket in a working class neighborhood of Paris, meeting with female cashiers and even helping a female customer with her strawberries.

"The female wage-earner is today's proletariat," she said, as she denounced profit-making enterprises for cutting rather than creating jobs.

But even women who are inclined to be supportive of Royal express disappointment that her campaign has been disorganized and she has not projected a stronger image of leadership and competence needed to govern France.

"She had a great start - a beautiful woman who promised change and who people could be proud of," said Nicole Bacharan, a political analyst at the Institut d'Études Politiques in Paris. "She has been attacked, not because she is a woman, I believe, but on the question of competence. If she is at a disadvantage, it is because voters are not convinced she is up to the job - and because the left has never had a majority in France."

Indeed, the combined total of the vote of Royal and the six other left-wing candidates - is estimated at only about 35 percent; altogether, four of the leftist candidates are women.

Sylviane Agacinski, a philosopher (who also is the wife of Lionel Jospin, the Socialist candidate in the 2002 election), warned against another phenomenon: the danger of "reverse sexism."

On Wednesday, arguing in Le Monde that Royal's femininity "has largely played in her favor," Agacinski said. "In this election, the French are asking only to be convinced that she is the best, and not to see her become the symbol of sexist revenge."

Thus far, Royal's appeal to the women of France does not seem to have resonated. Twenty-six percent of voters of both sexes say they intend to vote for her in a 12-way race, according to a telephone poll of more than 4,500 registered voters released April 2 by the polling institute CSA.

Paradoxically, the same poll shows that more women than men support Sarkozy - 29 percent of women voters, compared with 24 percent of male voters.

Jean-Daniel Lévy, political director of the CSA polling institute, said that the gap reflects age more than gender: that conservative voters tend to be older and that the longer life expectancy for women means that there are more older female than male voters in France.

"The age dimension is important," said Lévy. "Older women are inclined to vote for Sarkozy."

Women are less inclined to support the extreme right, which traditionally has been a male-dominated movement that has opposed the women's right to abortion and equality of women in the workplace, for example.

If women had been the only voters in the 2002 election, Jospin rather than Jean-Marie Le Pen, the head of the ultra-right National Front who is running again, would have qualified for the second round. If only men had voted, Le Pen would have come in first place, even ahead of the incumbent, President Jacques Chirac.

Royal's call to women may be part of a strategy to raise new issues in the final days of the campaign.

On Tuesday, for example, she promised to end the country's "monarchical drift" by slashing the president's entertainment budget, ending state subsidies for the lodging and private trips of ministers and examining the feasibility of opening up ministerial gardens to the public.

In recent weeks, she has fared better in the polls, moving further ahead of François Bayrou, the head of the centrist Union for French Democracy party. But in none of the polls has she ever edged past Sarkozy.

A CSA survey released on Tuesday showed Royal at 25 percent and Sarkozy at 27 percent in the first round and running 50-50 in the May 6 run-off.

Although Royal's repeated portrayal of herself as a victim who suffers because of sexism has been severely criticized, it still matters in some quarters.

Some of Royal's fiercest defenders decry the fact that she is perpetually judged on the way she looks. Indeed, the fact that she prefers flouncy skirts over sober pants suits like those favored by American presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and German Chancellor Angela Merkel has been much remarked on.

"Her jackets and dresses are the object of permanent commentaries," wrote novelist Geneviève Brisac in a commentary in Le Monde last month, adding, "I am scandalized to see this woman attacked without end over who she is and her appearance."

Not all of Royal's supporters are scandalized. In his comedy show, the humorist Jamel Debbouze compares Royal to Mary Poppins. He says that he hopes that if she is elected president, the photo of her in a blue bikini published last summer will serve as her official portrait in every police station in France.

Ariane Bernard provided additional reported.