ANYONE who heard President Jacques Chirac in London last week would have heard the voice of a confident, determined European.
"The European idea is anchored in people's minds and people's hearts, and we will not go back," he told the joint Houses of Parliament.
However, his message to a conference of pro European politicians in Paris the previous week had been more sombre do not give way to pessimism, he pleaded with the French people, but realise that the only way towards a secure future for France is through working for European unit .
His Paris message was typical of the new mood of pragmatism which now typifies most French conversations about Europe. The buses may still proudly display the European flag and shops may incorporate the European motif as a "feel good factor" into their sales campaign, but few people now believe that the bureaucrats in Brussels have any magic solutions to France's or Europe's problems of unemployment, economic insecurity and social division.
In the past week I have talked about French attitudes to Europe with a journalist, an economist, a political scientist, the deputy head of an opinion polling firm and a group of Parisian building workers. They all agreed on two things the French are now more sceptical about what the EU can do for ordinary people, yet tend to blame Brussels less than their own national rulers.
THIS cynicism about their rulers first became strikingly evident in the 1992 referendum, with its paper thin majority for the pro Manstricht camp led by the socialist President Mitterrand, the Gaullist opposition leader, Mr Cuirac, the business class and the media.
"The vast majority of those who voted `No' to Maastricht weren't against Europe," says Philippe Mechet, director of political research at Sofres, France's most influential polling firm. "But there wasn't any more the same vision of Europe as an expression of hope for a future of peace and economic prosperity. There was more a feeling that Europe was good for the ruling class and for big business, together with serious questioning about what it would bring to working class people, or even, for the first time, young people. The Maastricht vote was a way of saying `No' to the elites.
This new wariness was there again in another poll two months ago. This showed that despite regular poll findings that the majority of French people remain broadly in favour of monetary union, 80 per cent of them want another referendum before it is put in place.
The economist, Elie Cohen, believes that after last November and December's explosion of social unrest, a weary French people will eventually accept, albeit reluctantly, the cuts President Chirac still wants in spending on health, social services, and the nationalised industries in order to reduce the budget deficit and meet the requirements laid down by Maastricht for Economic and Monetary Union.
"Deep down most people realise that even without Maastricht we would have to reduce the budget deficit," says Dominique Moysi, deputy director of the French Institute of International Relations. "So Maastricht is a good inducement to do what needed to be done anyway.
A year of President Chirac has done little to change people's new cynicism towards Europe. "In the past three decades Europe was associated with France so much in people's minds that anything which helped to further European integration was seen as helping to further France's influence in the world," says Moisi.
This has been one of the constant themes of the new presidency's foreign policy that the only way for France to remain a world power is through its partnership with Germany in a new, increasingly united Europe.
In essence this policy is little different from Mitterrand's, even if Mr Chime's more muscular style is grinning him some kudos with a French electorate which likes its leaders to fight above their weight internationally.
BUT foreign policy is not what concerns people in the cafes and bars of working class Paris. When this reporter raised Europe with a group of building workers in St Denis in the city's northern "red belt", they wanted to talk about unemployment and economic insecurity.
They were frankly pessimistic. "Our leaders say a united Europe is the only way to be as big a power as America," said a clerk of works. "But because of the cost of our social services, running American firms is always going to be cheaper than in Europe. And the big firms know they can always get cheaper labour in Asia than in France."
They were also concerned about the poorer EU countries acting as a drag on France's economic well being. They did not include Ireland among these. Ireland, when it is considered at all, is seen as a friendly little nation St Denis has named a street after Bobby Sands.
There is less fear of EU domination by a united Germany than one might expect. "For most French people Germany is Europe," says Philippe Mechet. "The more you are afraid of Germany, the more you are pro Europe and for the reasons Helmut Kohl is pro-Europe so that the European Union can contain Germany's ambitions," says Dominique Moisi.
Ironically, Moisi says he detects a more hard headed kind of pro-European feeling in France these days. "With the growing disenchantment with the present and fears for the future, people are coming back to Europe in a totally different mood. They are saying that there is no alternative things are bad with Europe but they would be much worse without it."