Moderator: Okay, off the books. Why?

Chirac (laughing): We don't need the details. He was making a joke, everyone can see that.

Student: It may make you laugh. It doesn't make me laugh.

Chirac had one other big problem. Among Europe's leaders, he has been the most ardent backer of Turkey's candidacy for membership in the E.U., a candidacy which French voters oppose with more obduracy than those of any other Western European country. Chirac's Turkey policy came at zero political cost back in the 1990s, but since then, two political developments have undone it. First, to the astonishment of most E.U. leaders, Turkey has actually undertaken the democratic reforms that the E.U. made a precondition of its candidacy. Second, Western Europeans have been panicked by the flight of jobs to Eastern Europe. And Turkey, with wages that are lower still, will, by the time of its projected admission to the E.U., be the largest country in Europe.

Chirac exited the evening like Perot, not like Gore. Opposition to the E.U. constitution actually rose after his intervention, according to overnight polling--from 53 percent to 56 percent. What may have been most unnerving to Chirac is how few people felt they needed to hear his views on France's most important constitutional debate in almost 50 years. According to the daily Libération, the broadcast got only 7.4 million viewers nationwide, nosing past Clint Eastwood's Pale Rider, which got 6.4 million on another channel. Among the 15-to-34 age group that was Chirac's target

Since the Iraq war, Chirac's popularity has followed the same downward spiral from dizzying heights that the elder George Bush's did after the Gulf war. Chirac, though, sought to recapture a bit of the old magic by suggesting that the best argument for passing the E.U. constitution was that the Americans (and the British) dislike it. Should France vote "No" on the constitution, Chirac warned, "the free-market trend will spread. What do the Anglo-Saxon countries want, particularly the United States? They want us to stop this European construction, which risks creating a Europe that will be stronger and capable of defending itself."

France may not be turning into a nation of free-marketers and Yankee-lovers, but it is stunning to see how little purchase such arguments now have, how tired the public considers them. People are looking elsewhere for answers. Today, the leading source of information on the European constitution is not any of the daily newspapers but Etienne Chouard, who teaches classes de brevet de technicien supérieur (French for "shop") at a high school in Marseilles. In the past few weeks, Chouard's website (http://etienne.chouard.free.fr) has turned into a rallying point, a sort of low-tech French Drudge Report, full of simple republican sentiments. "I believe that it is fundamentally undemocratic to propose a constitution that is so difficult to read," Chouard writes.

The constitutional treaty is looking a bit like the last utopian gasp of the French generation of 1968. The more people get to know it, the more closely they read it, the less they seem to like it. After Chirac's failure on TV, former president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, who authored the constitution in consultation with European bureaucracies, went on One Hundred Minutes to Convince, France's Nightline, to try to save the day. "It's easy to read," he pleaded. "Limpid, rather beautifully written . . . " Without cracking a smile, he urged his readers to spend an evening reading the first 60 articles.

Indeed. Once you read those, you won't be able to put it down.

Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.