The sight of the deputies and senators of the French parliament travelling to Versailles to meet in “Congress” in order to amend the constitution so as to permit the ratification of a new European treaty has now become banal. It happens every time there is a new EU treaty, i.e. every three or four years now since the mid 1980s.
 
Each time, the vote goes through more or less “on the nod”: when the Congress met on Monday 4th February, to change the constitution for the Lisbon treaty, the vote was 540:181. Europe enjoys very broad support across large sections of the French political class. After all, ever since 9 May 1950, when Foreign Minister Robert Schuman (whom De Gaulle nicknamed “le boche”) called in the Clock Room of the Quai d’Orsay for the creation of what became the European Coal and Steel Community, the European construction has been largely a project driven by France.
 
The consensus in France in favour of Europe is so well entrenched, indeed, that an astute blogger on Le Monde’s web site was moved to compare the latest “Congress” to a recent European directive which has forced France to lift its ban on the administration of Prozac to children. “There you go, you little cheats in favour of the Yes vote, you have managed to get your thing through by force,” wrote “Cyrano” sarcastically. “In both cases (i.e. the Congress and the Prozac directive) it is a great victory for democracy and civilisation, but certainly not that of a despotic power which takes its orders from multinational companies! Come to think of it, I recommend Prozac: it helps you to sleep when you have a vile deed you need to forget.”
 
Cyrano’s cutting remarks are a small illustration of the fact that France is home to one of the most vibrant Eurosceptic movements in the whole EU. It was France, after all, which very nearly rejected the Maastricht treaty in 1992 and which did reject the European constitution in 2005 (along with the Netherlands). Neither of those results was a surprise: it is precisely a feature of French politics, throughout history and into our own time, that anti-establishment feeling runs high in this country famous for its rebellions. It is because of the striking combination of authoritarianism and anti-authoritarianism in the political culture of France that French political system has been accurately caricatured as “absolute monarchy tempered by regicide”.
 
Like the Italian, the French political system is characterised by extreme heterogeneity. Not only is there a marked tendency to political fragmentation, especially on the extremes – there were no fewer than three separate Trotskyite candidates at the last presidential election, in addition to the Communist Party candidate and José Bové, the radical agrarian anti-globalisation campaigner – but also the tradition in France of well-organised radically anti-establishment parties with mass support is deeply entrenched. If the once powerful Communist Party fulfilled this role throughout the Third Republic (1945–1958) and well into the 1970s - until François Mitterrand neutralised it by signing an electoral alliance with it in 1972 - it is the Front national of Jean-Marie Le Pen which now fulfils that role. The FN garnered nearly 5 million votes in the first round of the presidential election in 2002, as compared to 5.6 million for the man who won in the second round, Jacques Chirac.
 
The fragmentation on the Right of the French political spectrum, indeed, is nearly as great as on the Left. René Rémond, the political scientist, famously said that there were three Rights in France – the legitimist, Orleanist and Bonapartist, which correspond, respectively, to the extreme right, Christian Democracy and Gaullism. The distinction between these last two was collapsed only in recent years with the creation of the pro-presidential UMP party under Jacques Chirac, but the fragmentation remains elsewhere. Philippe de Villiers’ Mouvement pour la France is for those natural Front national voters who find Le Pen a little rumbustious, or not socially conservative enough, while the wonderfully-named Chasse, pêche, nature et tradition party is for those who like to hunt and shoot and campaign for the protection of rural traditions. And I have not even mentioned Jean-Pierre Chevènement, the former Socialist Minister of Defence whose pro-natalist policy and rigorous support for state sovereignty makes him a singularly conservative socialist.
 
It was all these disparate strands which came together in 2005 to see off the European constitution, just as they nearly succeeded in defeating the Maastricht treaty in 1992. The difference in 2005 was that important figures in the very mainstream and normally pro-European Socialist Party also campaigned for a No. The reason why (albeit momentary) unity could be achieved between Communists and nationalists, between Trotskyites and Catholics, was that, in spite of their fragmentation, they are united by one thing which is very powerful in France – a hatred of liberalism.
 
It was reaction against the dogmatic ideology of the free market, which in France is identified with the allegedly deregulatory zeal of the European Commission, which caused the European constitution to be rejected. The British, who have turned “free trade” into a political taboo – it is all right to be in favour of 40% income tax and 17.5% Value Added Tax but you are an antediluvian and a barbarian if you ever suggest a tax on imports or capital flows – run frightened when anyone says they do not like liberalism. But the fact is that France has almost never been “liberal” in the British sense throughout her long and glorious history, and yet she does not seem to be any the poorer as a result.
 
Euroscepticism in France, in other words, is precisely the opposite of Europscepticism in Britain. Whereas in France, those who dislike the EU also dislike France’s subjection to America and to the impersonal rule of bureaucrats in bodies like the World Trade Organisation, in Britain a spurious and largely dishonest distinction is invented between supranational rule from Brussels and supranational rule from Washington or Geneva. For the British Eurosceptic, the abandonment of national military independence through NATO is all right, as is the subjection of commercial policy to the dictates of the WTO. But such things suddenly (and inexplicably) become unacceptable when they flow from the EU.
 
At any rate, the result is that there is an extremely vibrant Eurosceptic movement in France. As befits a country with a tradition of intellectual brilliance, it is the Eurosceptics’ publications which are particularly outstanding. On the Right, perhaps the best is the monthly newspaper, L’Indépendance, edited by the sovereignist MEP and professional author, Paul-Marie Coûteaux, who writes exquisite French and who publishers talented authors such as Philippe de Saint-Robert and noted academics such as the historian, Jean-Paul Bled, and the economist, Jacques Sapir. There is even a publisher, my own, François-Xavier de Guibert, who assisted by his editorial director, the Sorbonne historian, Edouard Husson, has produced a string of excellent books attacking the EU’s anti-democratic drift. On the Left, the indefatigable Pierre Lévy publishes Bastille, République, Nations (which he has abbreviated to BRN perhaps in order not to offend the anti-revolutionary sensibilities of those on the Right (like myself) who have been honoured to write for his newspaper). These papers are devoted specifically to the European issue – Lévy describes his paper as radicalement eurocritique – but there are also plenty of papers who share their take on Europe but which deal with other issues too, including the two main papers close to the Front national, Minute and Présent, not to mention of course the royalist and historically very august Action française, whose veteran editor, Pierre Pujo, the son of the paper’s founder, died last November.
 
For the time being, of course, all these movements remain precisely anti-establishment and therefore marginalised. As the huge majorities obtained every time in the Congress show, the consensus in favour of Europe in France is very great. But this only shows the general disconnect between the French political class and the electorate – that disconnect which Charles Maurras referred to as between le pays legal and le pays reel. I have long maintained that if the current post-national and post-modern drive in the EU is ever to be stopped, it is only from France that the initiative will come. Britain feels that it has elsewhere to go, geo-politically speaking, which is why all debate in Britain about Europe is about whether the country will be “in” or “out” of the latest developments. The debate never takes place in those terms in France, precisely because the French cannot “escape” from Europe. It is for this reason that Europe’s future and hers are so inseparably linked.