The French Prime Minister, Mr Lionel Jospin, yesterday tried to calm the dispute over Corsican autonomy that threatens his leftwing government - and challenges the very notion of French national unity and central government control.
He postponed a meeting with his Interior Minister, Mr Jean-Pierre Chevenement, to give them both a "period of reflection".
After today's council of ministers, the government will go on its annual holiday until August 24th. Mr Jospin is praying that the issue will blow over - and that President Jacques Chirac, who has been ominously silent on Corsica, will not upset his attempts to defuse the issue by taking a stand at the cabinet meeting.
But there is little chance the Corsican question will disappear for long. There have been widespread calls for Mr Chevenement's resignation since he announced last week that he would refuse to defend the government's draft law on Corsican autonomy in the National Assembly this autumn.
The agreement approved on July 28th in the Corsican assembly will allow Corsican legislators to change laws made in Paris - with the National Assembly's approval until 2004, without it thereafter. It makes teaching the Corsican language mandatory in the island's schools and exonerates Corsicans from French death duties for 10 years. Critics of the agreement fear it will encourage similar demands from Basque and Breton nationalists.
Although classified as "far-left", Mr Chevenement's tiny "Mouvement des citoyens" (MDC), which represents only 2 per cent of the French electorate, epitomises a secular, republican, jacobin strain of French politics rooted in the 1789 revolution. It opposes European monetary union and believes that French national identity supersedes regional or European ties.
The debate over Corsica has confused traditional political alliances; the MDC sides with rightwing Gaullists who oppose the agreement, while Mr Jospin's socialists are in league with the centre-right Liberal Democrat President of the Corsican Assembly, Mr Jose Rossi.
Mr Chevenement (61) survived cardiac arrest and a three-week coma in the autumn of 1998. Although he has been a close friend of Mr Jospin for 30 years, his relations with the minister of justice, Ms Elisabeth Guigou, and of the environment, Ms Dominique Voynet, have been strained. Mr Chevenement created a furore in June when he responded to German Foreign Minister Joseph Fischer's plea for greater European integration by saying that the Germans had not recovered from their Nazi past.
One of Mr Chevenement's most famous bons mots is that a minister "ca ferme sa gueule ou ca demissione" (shuts his trap or resigns). He has twice followed his own maxim. Mr Chevenement left the ministry of industry in 1983 in protest at austerity measures. Long a supporter of President Saddam Hussein of Iraq, he resigned as defence minister during the 1991 Gulf War. He was regarded as pro-Serb during the 1999 Yugoslav war.
The autonomy agreement represents a significant shift in Mr Jospin's policy. In September 1999, the Prime Minister said that "no institutional discussion can take place as long as violence is used as a weapon, even in debate". Yet over the past 11 months, his cabinet proceeded to negotiate the accord with Corsican nationalist politicians, including Mr Jean-Guy Talamoni, the leader of Corsica Nazione.
The move has been seen as a sell-out by Mr Jospin in the hope of keeping the explosive island quiet in the run-up to the 2002 presidential election.
Mr Francois d'Aubert broke ranks with his Liberal Democracy party to criticise the accord. It was "negotiated with those who refuse to condemn violence, terrorism and racketeering," he said, and would "turn the island into a sort of banana republic".
Mr Talamoni, a hot-blooded, young Napoleon look-alike, told the Corsican assembly that the accord was a step towards independence and implicitly praised Mr Yvon Colonna, a nationalist suspected of murdering the Prefect, Mr Claude Erignac, and who is on the run.
If "certain subjects" - Corsican prisoners - were not addressed soon, "the entire undertaking will become irrelevant", Mr Talamoni said, suggesting that nationalists would return to violence. He called Mr Chevenement a "Parisian, jacobin dinosaur". The interior minister said he was "scandalised" by the nationalist leader's "threats".