YOU HAVE to hand it to the French. No one matches their panache when it comes to demolishing the ancien régime and proclaiming a glorious new dawn. For the guerrilla resistance that has ambushed the heavy cavalry of the establishment, the likely “non” in tomorrow’s referendum on the European constitution is another dash for a radiant future. May 2005, they hope, will join all those other revolutionary beacons which have illuminated modern French history, from July 1789 to May 1968. Most of those revolts ended in tears and it is worth examining why this one is heading the same way.

The Elysée Palace and much of the continent will certainly view a “no” as a self-destructive tantrum by the nation that fathered the European project and put a Gallic stamp on the constitutional treaty. Amid the likely glee in Britain on Monday, though, remember that French rejection is largely driven not by hostility to the idea of Union but by the desire for “another Europe”, a dream alternative with France in the driver’s seat.

For the mutineers of Right and Left, the looming “no” is a chance to give a bloody nose to a rotten political class. This arrogant nomenklatura is being punished for failing to listen in 1992 when President Mitterrand almost lost his Maastricht referendum and again in 2002 when Jacques Chirac pursued business as usual after his traumatic re-election against Jean-Marie Le Pen, the ultra-right bruiser. Beset with high unemployment, France clings to its protective state while blaming out-of-touch politicians for the malaise that has afflicted it for three decades. It has dumped its governments at every parliamentary election since 1978.

As good French revolutionaries, the nonistes also see themselves blazing a trail not just for France but for humanity. They want to lead Europe on a hop back to the future. For the left-wing voters, this is the Utopia imagined by Karl Marx and last glimpsed elsewhere in the 1970s. For the Right, it is the sombre patrie of the paranoid and protectionist 1930s.

The people of Europe, say the nonistes, will cheer a “no” as the opening shot in the battle for a new, socially protective Union. “Ours is a ‘no’ of foundation,” says Philippe de Villiers, the rural aristocrat who has eclipsed Le Pen as champion of the nationalist Right. “Ours is a joyful ‘no’ of hope,” says Marie-George Buffet, the Communist leader, whose party is enjoying a new lease of life. Laurent Fabius, the socialist grandee who leads the middle class left-wing resistance, is talking about a salutory “no” of liberation.

The sans-culottes of this new old Europe, we are told, will guillotine the British-dominated Brussels bureaucracy and throw up barriers to imports and offshoring, harmonise taxes upwards and bestow a French-style welfare state on the continent. France will be spared the Polish plumber, the migrant worker who has become the campaign bogeyman for both Le Pen and leftwing nonistes.

In the face of all the rhétorique de la rupture, the ouistes have marshalled a limp defence along the lines of Louis XV’s “Après moi, le déluge”. M Chirac’s claim that the constitution is “the daughter of the 1789 revolution” prompted mirth. François Hollande, the Socialist leader, has been damned by much of his own party at best as a wimp and at worst as a collaborator of the reviled Right.

Of course much of the country is not scared of the modern world and France is still the prosperous envy of most others. It is striking, though, to see how deep the mood of rejection and rebellion is running. “Non” is the sexy option. It produces a frisson at Paris dinner parties and friends in the business world guiltily admit to be heading for a “non”.

Part of their mood is shared almost everywhere else in Europe: it springs from distaste for Brussels and a sense that the EU is out of their control. But France is far out of sync with the rest of the world and it is easy to see why. The blame can be pinned on an establishment that has bowed since the 1970s to France’s resistance to change unless it comes with revolution.

Alone in Europe, France has no main party that openly favours the market. After 1981, the Socialists, under Mitterrand and Lionel Jospin, their recent Prime Minister, reformed by stealth while soothing their public with Marxism. M Chirac has most to answer for. Since his election in 1995 he has lulled the country with Socialist-sounding talk while his governments have stirred public wrath with modest reforms to the welfare state that clash with the President ’s promises. This has led to the surreal campaign this spring in which the dirtiest of words, for both the “yes” and “no” camps, has been “liberal”, meaning free-market thinking.

The nonistes have suddenly discovered that Europe has always been “liberal” like Monsieur Jourdain, Molière’s hero, who discovered that he had been talking prose all his life, and they want to stop it. Unbelievably, M Chirac has sought to allay their fears not by explaining reality but by denouncing liberalism as the “new communism” and promising that the constitution will fight it. Only Nicolas Sarkozy, Chirac’s chief rival and leader of his Union for a Popular Majority (UMP), is breaking the taboo and blaming unemployment on the cherished French model.

This result of all this this flight from reality seems likely to be a giant own goal for France tomorrow and the consignment of M Chirac to the league of history’s losers. On Monday, with two years left in office, the old monarch will probably sack Jean-Pierre Raffarin, his Prime Minister, and once again promise to listen to the people.

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