Because the French state is being restructured in preparation for the rigors of European Monetary Union, due to be introduced in 1999. To be in the first wave of countries to use the single currency, nations have to reduce their budget deficits to no more than 3 percent of GDP. Chirac’s government has slashed subsidies and benefits; but France has an unemployment rate of nearly 13 percent, so this has been roundly hated. Now the president seeks a new mandate for yet more austerity, in elections whose first round will be in late May. “We’ve got to let the people be heard again,” said Chirac in an address last week, “so they can state their position clearly.”

Admirable: but what if the people reply to this invitation with some Gallic phrase unprintable in a family magazine? That would then prove that the gap between popular and elite sentiment on the future development of Europe had become dangerously large; reverberations would echo around the Continent.

For the establishments of Germany, France, most of the other Continental nations–and for a chunk of the British one, too–“Europe” has become a fixation. Only ties that bind the countries of the European Union ever closer together, it is said, can stop Germany from dominating the Continent once more. The best available tie is a single currency. So it has become an article of faith that the new currency, or euro, must be introduced on schedule. All of which has a flaw: it’s not certain that ordinary voters are on board.

In Britain, the issue has dominated the last weeks of the general-election campaign. John Major, the beleaguered prime minister, got a lift in the polls when he adopted a more Euro-skeptic line. Tony Blair, leader of the Labour Party, went into rapid-response mode. “I am a British patriot,” he said. “I will always put the interests of my country first.”

Other Europeans have come to expect the British to wrap themselves in the Union Jack. But what if the Germans, champion Euro-fanatics, had a rethink about the future? German elections will be held in 1998; Helmut Kohl, the chancellor, has announced that he will be a candidate for a record fifth time. For Kohl, exorcising Germany’s history by binding it ever closer into the EU is a life’s ambition–even if it means giving up the Germans’ beloved Deutsche mark. He won’t wobble on the euro. But might his Social Democratic challenger? The SPD has, if anything, been even more earnestly devoted to Europe than Kohl’s Christian Democrats, and Oskar Lafontaine, the current SPD leader, is firmly within party tradition. But polls (which Germans can read as well as anyone else) show Lafontaine trailing Kohl by 7 percentage points. By contrast, Gerhard Schroder, the SPD premier of Lower Saxony, leads Kohl by 14 points. Schroder has not actually come out against the single currency. He has, however, said that discussing it “cannot be a taboo.” In the current, ossified state of German political debate, that’s quite brave. Honestly.

To the south, Italian politics has just had its own Euro-shock. A report by the European Commission found that Italy was unlikely to make the 3 percent deficit limit by next year. This surprised nobody but the Italians; Prime Minister Romano Prodi called the report “incomprehensible,” while the Rome newspaper La Repubblica leveled dark charges of “economic racism.” Calmer observers might have wondered how the euro was supposed to unite Europe if one of its first consequences would be to expel Italy from the inner circle.

Such observers, should any be left, might also be giving themselves a stiff drink in anticipation of a French election that could go badly wrong. The Socialist Party, now in the minority in the National Assembly, can hardly oppose a single currency–it was in government when the Treaty of Maastricht, which started this round of the dance, was signed. The French political party with the cleanest hands on the unpopular euro is the far-right National Front. If Jean-Marie Le Pen, the front’s leader, did not before have a way of presenting himself as the defender of French tradition, he does now. French political commentators are telling themselves that the front cannot win more than a handful of seats in the assembly. But Le Pen behaved, last week, like a man who will enjoy an election campaign. All courtesy of Jacques Chirac, who, as noted above, is an unusual man. Or, maybe, a foolish one.