The inhabitants of Vaux-en-Beaujolais, a picturesque village in one of the most famous wine-growing regions, love nothing better than a celebration.

They have fond memories of the party they held in the caveau, the big wine cellar where village meetings take place, when France won the football world cup in 1998.

“It went on for a couple of days, as far as I remember,” said Raymond Philibert, the mayor.

In those days France felt good about itself. Not any more. “People are angry and frightened,” said Philibert.

Superficially, it is hard to imagine why. Perched on a hilltop amid rolling vineyards Vaux-en-Beaujolais is, perhaps, every foreigner’s fantasy of what a French village should look like. Four British families live here and many others holiday in the area.

But Vaux is also the model for Clochemerle, the comic French novel of the 1930s in which the mayor wages battle with the local priest over the installation of a public urinal, or pissoir, beside the church. The book became a cult television series in the 1970s.

In French culture Clochemerle is a byword for polarisation — a symbol that has never seemed truer than today. In a strange example of reality echoing fiction, the villagers were arguing last week about the mayor’s construction of a public urinal to be inaugurated early next year.

That is nothing, however, compared with the divisions that have opened up over today’s referendum on the proposed European Union constitution. There have been lively exchanges in the boulangerie, and at a wedding a heated argument erupted between the families of the bride and the bridegroom: one side was solidly non, the other oui.

Philibert, a political independent and former civil servant who has been mayor since 1983, is against the constitution. “I get a lot of people trying to make me change my mind,” he said as he strolled through the village on a sunny morning last week, an affable 59-year-old in a floral shirt.

There is no chance of that: he railed tirelessly at the “self-important, pompous, politicians” trying to impose their will on La France d’en bas, the powerless, little people of places such as Vaux-en-Beaujolais. “The referendum gives people a chance to talk about their grudges,” said Philibert. “And people have a lot of grudges. Grudges against the government.”

The grievances are not over the constitution itself but over fears that their way of life is vanishing. While British industrial workers have lost their jobs to lower-paid Asians, the vignerons of Beaujolais have seen their traditional markets swept away on a tide of Australian and South American cabernet sauvignon.

They blame globalisation and fashion: the perfidious anglais no longer race away with their beaujolais nouveau. And they say the French government is destroying the domestic wine market by its “zero tolerance” of drink- driving.

Today is their chance to hit back. According to the mayor, as many as 55%-60% of Vaux-en-Beaujolais’s 850 voters are likely to say non. That is on the high side of national polling but Vaux-en-Beaujolais has long been a weathervane of French opinion. If it turns out to be an accurate indicator of the national mood once more, today’s referendum could mark the end of almost 50 years of continuous European expansion and integration.

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