WorldView... Paul Gillespie: According to Paul Valéry "the French distinguish themselves by thinking they are universal". From the time of the French Revolution they have shown a capacity to project their own experience on to a world in which they then recognise and reaffirm themselves.
This engaged relationship with others has been a great source of strength in economic and political affairs, as well as in cultural terms. It made for a confidence in which the French felt at ease with the world and helped enormously to reproduce their intellectual and practical achievements in the post-war period - and especially so in Europe.
In recent years this easy confidence has been increasingly questioned and eroded, along with its elite exemplars in French society. Exceptionalism became less universalist and more protectionist.
In the late 1980s François Furet and others published a revisionist book on French republicanism subtitled La Fin de l'Exception Française. This generated heated debate on the role of the revolution and on an alternative and relatively optimistic account of how France could learn from other political models, particularly liberal ones. In response its republican and sovereigntist critics defended France's strong statist traditions.
These debates fed into politics and foreign policy, as the bicentenary anniversary of the revolution coincided with another great change in European politics, the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
The new protectionism was exemplified in the right won by French negotiators during the world trade Uruguay Round in 1994 to protect their film industry from US competition. It is seen in a parallel desire to protect the French language from being undermined by English, making the issue of cultural diversity a new priority in its foreign policy.
France is regarded as a different society from its neighbours and partners with the right to use a powerful state to ensure it remains so.
When the conglomerate businessman Jean-Marie Messier questioned l'exception française several years ago there was a furore in politics and the media about the deleterious impact of globalisation and European integration on French society.
These themes have been growing through the last decade. In the referendum campaign on the European Union's constitution they have been raised to a new level of intensity; so much so that many commentators discern a crisis of national identity at play, a "discursive shift" which will redefine the European issue in French politics and reduce France's influence abroad if the No side wins.
France's social model is counterposed to the Anglo-Saxon neo- or ultra-liberal one. The trope is accepted by Jacques Chirac (though not by his most likely successor Nicolas Sarkozy, who has consistently argued that France, too, must undergo the changes made elsewhere in Europe to adapt to such forces).
Chirac's government is blamed by the writer Alain Duhamel for a "generalised economic malaise, inspired by rising unemployment. stagnant salaries, falling spending power, pension worries, the fear of jobs being lost abroad, of Poles and Lithuanians taking jobs here. It's a No to today's world; a No to a frightening world".
Polling experts discern a clear difference between two countries, a "well-off confident France" of professionals, managers and graduates who will vote Yes and an "anxious, struggling" France of blue- and lower-grade white-collar workers, self-employed and farmers who will vote No.
Others see a collapse of French identification with an enlarged European Union in which France's unique exemplarité has been lost and in which "we don't know who or where we are". As Eric Zemmour put it in Le Figaro: "We exported democracy across a continent; we defined the notion of universal human rights. And now we learn it's all worthless, that Europe's going to decide."
In a revealing article in Tuesday's Guardian from which these examples are drawn Jon Henley concluded by quoting Eric Morgan de Rivery, an EU specialist with the law firm Jones Day: "We're witnessing one of the last remnants of the French exception. French society is different to American society or British society. But we have to adapt. The constitution has confronted France with a debate it should have been having for a decade or more. And now we're blaming Europe for our own immobilism."
And for their own badly led and uninspiring government, one must add. Serge July suggested in Libération this week that the only way Chirac could ensure a Yes vote would be to dissolve the National Assembly and call parliamentary elections before the referendum.
This would have separated the national political from the European issue, but also probably have landed Chirac with another cohabitation government for the remainder of his presidential term. Sacking the prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin after a No vote would not suffice to swing opinion. Without such a sensational move before the vote it is unlikely that the Yes side will win.
These narrowing perspectives on the nationalist right and the sovereigntist and republican left in France emerging in the intense campaign may be contrasted with the ideas put forward by the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur (who died this week) over his long and extraordinarily fruitful career.
Analysing identity, he distinguished between two major meanings of the term: sameness, and the selfhood or "I" which continually reflects on this continuing "me".
His masterpiece, Soi-même Comme un Autre (Oneself as Another) published in 1990 "suggests from the outset that the selfhood of oneself implies otherness to such an intimate degree that one cannot be thought of without the other, that instead one passes over into the other . . . To 'as' I should like to attach a strong meaning, not only that of a comparison (oneself similar to another) but indeed that of an implication (oneself inasmuch as being other)".
Ricoeur applied these ideas to European and French identity, suggesting that translation, the exchange and entanglements of memory, mutual forgiveness and intercultural narratives must be its guiding principles.
They are also the hallmarks of classical French universalism. Ricoeur taught in the University of Chicago from 1970 to 1992 after leaving France relatively unrecognised and undervalued.
In a tribute to him in Le Monde Charles Larmore said it was in the US he was to find his way and blossom to the point where he established his authority in French thought over the last 20 years. That confident engagement with the other, of which he was a personal and intellectual exemplar, sorely needs reviving in France today.