Liberté, égalité and a few Polish plumbers

Politics runs through French veins but, laments Jim Shields, the debate on Europe was anything but revolutionary

"You were once my hero," cried a voice from the floor. "Now I think you're an imbecile." The firebrand leader of the Mai '68 student revolt in Paris, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, had just addressed an audience of Green Party sympathisers. The one-time scourge of the French establishment, now a German Green MEP, had returned to Paris to support the oui campaign in the European Union constitutional treaty referendum. Greeted with insults and occasionally eggs, Dany le Vert must have reflected on how things had changed since the days when he gloried in the sobriquet Dany le Rouge. May 2005, we were told, was another of those guerres franco-francaises that have periodically convulsed France - 1789, Dreyfus, Vichy, Algeria, Mai '68...

Certainly, this referendum generated much heated debate, dividing communities, families and consciences. Memories of the debates that had impassioned students and intellectuals occupying the Odeon Theatre through those heady days of 1968 were stirred, reminding the French that politics runs in their veins. But Mai '68 this was not. There was nothing here of the spirit that characterised Dany le Rouge's revolt against Gaullist authority; nothing of the expansive humanitarianism that made opposition to the Vietnam War as pressing as the reform of France's creaking educational system. Mai '68 was for many a high-minded mission beyond the frontiers of education, realpolitik and France itself, a model of youthful idealism for the world. True, one of the most urgent demands of the soixante-huitards was access to the dormitories of the opposite sex; but that too can be high-minded in its own way.

May 2005 was quite different. It reactivated debate on French campuses, but a dispiritingly arid debate that pitted an ossified "French social model" against "Anglo-Saxon ultra-liberalism". Four decades ago, the fear was of a nuclear conflagration provoked by irresponsible deployment of military might. Another fear, on the French Left, was of state power trampling civil liberties unchecked. Today, France is stalked by fear of Polish plumbers invading to undercut their French counterparts, wreck welfare services and exacerbate an unemployment rate of more than 10 per cent (23 per cent among under-25s).

The victorious non campaign brought together far-Right, far-Left and, crucially, most centre-Left voters. It attracted a large majority of 18 to 49-year-olds, notably with low academic attainment; those with the baccalauréat were evenly split and those with higher education voted mainly, though not overwhelmingly, oui . This is an entire postwar generation whose priority is not nurturing peace and civil liberties but finding - or keeping - a job. Whereas student optimism led and workers followed in 1968, the pessimism of the French workplace today made those arguing the intellectual case for Europe seem remote from the problems of la France profonde . The same pessimism was echoed in the Netherlands' even more resounding nee .

Compounded by widespread disenchantment with Jacques Chirac's administration, the French campaign was a parochial affair focused on a national agenda and a shrunken conception of social justice. It was also informed largely by misapprehension. The constitutional treaty was rightly criticised as unreadable legalese; but it was wrongly accused of institutionalising economic liberalism across the EU. That was institutionalised in the 1957 Treaty of Rome, whose free-market provisions were reiterated here alongside those of other treaties. The real innovations of this document - charter of rights, elected President, Foreign Minister and diplomatic service - barely elicited comment, while argument raged over the frequency of the words "concurrence" (competition) and " social ".

With the 191-page treaty posted to all 41 million registered voters, and with books about the EU topping bestseller lists in France, one might have expected less heat and more light. A note for the record: the French plumbing union estimates the number of Polish plumbers in France at about 150 - and the shortage of plumbers at 6,000. "No one has dared tell the French Left that we live in a world of market forces," sighed Mr Cohn-Bendit in an interview. From the mouth that screamed defiance in de Gaulle's face, this was a sobering remark. But it, too, was parochial. It said nothing about the failure of the French in this campaign to embrace the wider picture - to engage with the challenges posed by US military hegemony, the emergent powers of Asia, the environment, the developing world. The opportunity for such urgent debate was lost in the myopia of a referendum on the enlarged Europe that was more about a narrowly Gallic France.

Jim Shields is senior lecturer in French studies and director of studies in modern French politics and society at Warwick University.