ON A WARM day in May Clermont-Ferrand is a postcard of France’s gentle life. Below the green peaks of les puys, the ring of extinct volcanoes in the Massif Central, the old city exudes a tidy prosperity typical of la France profonde.

Yet rebellion lurks in the capital of the Auvergne. The Auvergnats have prided themselves on being a stubborn highland tribe ever since Vercingetorix led a Gaulish rebellion against Julius Caesar’s legions. Now they are refusing to be pushed around by foreigners from the European Union or the Gallic governing classes demanding they approve its constitution in Sunday’s referendum.

The treaty may have been drafted by the Auvergne’s modern hero, the former French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, but resistance is palpable on the streets of Clermont and Montferrand, rival towns joined by Louis XIII in 1630. The gripe is an amplified version of the “no” heard across France: the document locks Europe into a British-inspired “liberal” straitjacket that will export jobs, dilute the EU with new members including Turkey and destroy the Gallic way of life. For the Left and the hard Right led by Philippe de Villiers and Jean-Marie Le Pen, it has become synonymous with a new bogeyman: “the Polish plumber” — the low-wage worker supposedly out to steal jobs.

“The ‘non’ is very strong here,” Odile Saugues, a trade union leader from the Michelin factory and Socialist MP for Montferrand, said. She backed the Maastricht treaty in 1992 but has broken with her party and rejected “this totally unacceptable text”. Serge Godard, Clermont’s Socialist mayor, and the area’s four Socialist MPs have joined the “no” camp. Louis Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry’s son, is the only MP to be campaigning for a “oui”.

Mme Saugues talks like a British old-Labourite. She is a workers’ champion, a believer in Europe — and no ally of the Trotskyites whose guerrilla campaign sank the Socialists in the presidential election of 2002 and who are again acting as a magnet for the disaffected. “I’m suffering a lot,” she said. “It’s very hard to live with this, but I have to say ‘no’ because the treaty forces a real liberal policy on Europe, pitting worker against worker, flouting social rights.”

France has just twigged that the European Community has been dedicated to open competition since the start, and that the constitution appears to consolidate doctrines alien to France’s tradition of strong state regulation.

“We know these are old ideas, but now we realise that we cannot abrogate them or change anything. I don’t have hard feelings towards the British because they suffered from a social shredding machine called Margaret Thatcher. So the British are less shocked than us by the harshness of the treaty. We have a high level of social protection and I do not want that (British) future for my children.”

Mme Saugues agrees with the prevailing view that a victory for the “no” campaign is the price that the Establishment elite will pay for failing to reconnect with the people after forcing through the Maastricht treaty in 1992.

That is the refrain across France, and it comes over clearly at Clermont’s university. “Europe is the only political idea that can make the young dream,” Olivier Mollaz, 25, a student leader and Trotskyist, said. “But the constitution’s Europe has been built in such an undemocratic and antisocial way that we can only refuse it. For 20 years we have suffered from the Thatcher Reagan counter-revolution and we have never approved it.”

His views may sound naive, but they are widely shared among the politically correct Centre Left who dominate France’s thinking classes.

A good example can be found in the chambers of Gilles-Jean Portejoie, a celebrity lawyer who is the deputy mayor and an ardent Auvergnat. Maître Portejoie, 55, describes himself as a visceral European. He said that Europe had been good to Clermont, funding big public works such as the city’s lavish new tramway. But France had to regain the initiative by killing the “too liberal” constitution and renegotiating a better one.

“Voting ‘no’ means saying ‘yes’ to another world, to another Europe and another France, a world in which the market is not institutionalised,” he said.

These are not the words of a dreamer on the margins of the globalising economy, but of a prosperous barrister whose clients include pop stars.

Such thinking is the despair of the Establishment. President Chirac and François Hollande, the Socialist Party chief, are frustrated that the “no” camp has the sexy arguments, however unrealistic they may be, while they have made only a limp case for voting “yes”. With four days to go, they are reduced to praying that voters will revert to France’s pro-EU tradition and pull back from the brink.

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