Analysis: When he came to power 37 months ago, the French prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin coined the expression "La France d'en bas" - grass-roots France - as a term of endearment for the people he thought he could govern.
Since the late 1980s, "La France d'en bas" had expressed its disgust with politics by refraining from voting.
In the 2002 presidential race that re-elected President Jacques Chirac, "La France d'en bas" gave the world a scare by voting for extremist parties and sending the National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen to the run-off.
On Sunday, seven out of 10 French people voted, but "La France d'en bas" achieved revenge, dooming Mr Raffarin's government, and probably the European constitutional treaty.
The historian Nicolas Bavarez called Sunday's referendum "a democratic uprising against a background of deep division".
The clash confronted "those who work against those who don't; the private sector against the public sector; cities against rural areas; the France that is exposed against the France that is protected," he said.
The colour-coded maps published by French newspapers yesterday show France's geographic divisions. One can't help remembering how the urban, coastal "blue states" voted Democrat in the last two US elections; the sparsely populated, inland "red states" Republican.
The maps show how successful leaders of the No camp were in convincing voters that the treaty pitted less-educated have-nots against the affluent.
Rich cities voted for the treaty; the countryside against it.
Paris, whose socialist mayor Bertrand Delanoë campaigned for the treaty, had the highest Yes vote in the country, at 66.45 per cent. Lyons (with the surrounding Rhône department), Strasbourg (with the lower Rhine department), Bordeaux, Nantes, Rennes, Grenoble and Toulouse all voted Yes.
The No vote scored highest in working class and agrarian areas with high unemployment - more than 60 per cent in Upper Normandy, Picardy, Nord-Pas-De-Calais and Languedoc-Roussillon.
The less affluent cities of Marseilles, Nice, Lille, Le Havre and Valenciennes voted No too.
The only four regions that voted Yes - Brittany and the adjacent Loire country, Alsace and the Île-de-France (surrounding Paris) all voted Yes to the Maastricht Treaty on monetary union in 1992.
When you study comparative maps of the 1992 referendum and Sunday's vote, it's clear that the division between the wealthy, urban France that welcomed the single currency and the poor countryside, which did not, was already present. In the intervening 13 years, the division amplified dramatically.
An opinion poll conducted on referendum day for Le Monde, RTL radio and TF1 television confirmed that the gap between Yes and No voters was also based on profession and age. Sixty-two per cent of white- collar workers and those in "intellectual professions" voted Yes; 57 per cent of those with a university education and 56 per cent of retired people voted Yes.
Everyone else voted No: 82 per cent of manual labourers; 79 per cent of the unemployed; 60 per cent of salaried employees.
The break-down by political allegiance is also revealing. Ninety-six per cent of the supporters of the extreme right-wing National Front and MNR voted No; 95 per cent of communists; 67 per cent of the entire spectrum of the French left, including 59 per cent of socialists. The mainstream centre-right parties were the only ones to vote in their majority for the treaty, with a 76 per cent Yes vote.
When pollsters asked No voters why they opposed the treaty, fears that it would worsen France's 10.2 per cent unemployment were cited first by 46 per cent. Feeling "fed up" was the second reason, at 40 per cent. A front-page analysis in Le Monde, entitled "Disenchantment", noted that the French felt they were "losing out in the great battle of globalisation . . . and that the constitution did nothing to improve things". The economic principles inherent in the text - competition in public services; the free circulation of goods, services and capital; the disappearance of internal borders and the weakening of external borders; flexibility in the labour market - were seen as an assault on the French way of life. Furthermore, the French realised that, contrary to what their leaders told them, Europe was not being built on a French model, and was not a way of projecting French power on the international stage.
