It is beginning to feel like 1992. Then, within hours of Denmark saying No to Maastricht, François Mitterrand deliberately went for a referendum of his own to show the Danes how big an integrationist vote a founding member of the European Union could deliver. It voted Yes by a fraction over 1 per cent. Jacques Chirac, French president, is approaching his May 29 referendum on the EU constitution with slightly less hubris. But suddenly it seems as though those French diplomats trying to work out the consequences of a No vote in other EU states' referendums have been looking in the wrong place.

For the first time, a French opinion poll yesterday showed a slight majority (51-49 per cent) against the EU treaty, with pro-treaty support down 14 percentage points since the survey three weeks ago. This precipitous drop probably reflects the rash of protest strikes at public sector pay and relaxation of the 35-hour working week over that period. Since the government's attempts at pay restraint stem from EU fiscal guidelines, it all feeds into France's progressive disenchantment with an EU that it, and others, long believed had been fashioned in Paris's image and to its liking.

The illusion has taken time to shatter, because for so long Brussels felt so much like Paris. EU business was conducted largely in French, and in French-style institutions; the EU, for instance, has a useless Economic and Social Committee modelled on an equally useless corporatist body in Paris. The French also took comfort in the fact that Jean Monnet, the EU's chief founding father, was French. But Monnet also had close friends among US anti-trust lawyers, who influenced him into giving the EU tough rules on liberalisation and free markets which, decades later, increasingly chafe with his fellow-countrymen. Disillusion has accelerated with the EU's enlargement, especially its embrace of central Europe. This has sharpened concerns about low-cost competition from the east, which in turn has crystallised in opposition to the EU services directive.

Mr Chirac's latest move to blow the directive out of the water was to ring up José Manuel Barroso, the Commission president, this week to tell him the services plan was "unacceptable", and then spread his démarche all over the French press. Hardly a tactic to endear Brussels to the French electorate, or himself to Mr Barroso, who said he was "amazed at the French debate".

Mr Barroso should stand firm, if he is to have any chance of regaining some of the authority the EU executive has lost to member states in recent years. As for Mr Chirac, he needs to try to shift the debate in France away from social and economic controversies unrelated to the EU constitution, and towards the main changes wrought by that treaty. For these have the effect of increasing the say of bigger states in EU decision-making, and raising Europe's foreign policy profile in the world, in ways that ought to appeal to the French.