Meanwhile another plaintive voice of Europe was heard, complaining of the way an ungrateful world was ganging up against the hapless Europeans.

"The European Union has made some very serious and highly credible offers on agriculture to reduce our subsidies in a major way," the EU's trade commissioner, Peter Mandelson, told the BBC as the world trade talks stalled.

"The problem is that whatever we say, whatever our proposals, they are not enough for the very competitive and productive food exporters like Brazil, Australia, New Zealand and the United States."

The EU is now isolated at the trade talks and estranged from its natural trading partners because the French government has imposed its veto on any more concessions that might undo the lavish protection enjoyed by France's farmers.

And yet the latest figures from France's farming sector, as extracted from the country's labyrinthine and deceptive accounts by the investigative journalists of La Tribune, point out that the bulk of the $9 billion that France's farmers receive in EU subsidies goes to a handful of agro-industry concerns and rich landowners, among them the Prince of Monaco, while the small farmers who are supposed to be protected share some 17 percent of the EU's money.

Were France still a rural country, showing to the world only the bucolic face of contented cows and picturesque paysage, and were French peasants able to muster more than 5 percent of the vote, the obduracy of President Jacques Chirac might be easier to understand, if not to forgive.

But the reality of France today has been more clearly seen in the urban fires that have illuminated the world's TV screens for the last two weeks, and in the hooded animosity of young blacks and Arabs from some of the worst slums in Europe. France is an urban country in crisis, which imposes on the rest of Europe food prices that are up to three times as high as the world average, in order to protect the myth of a peasantry that no longer exists.

Instead, what has surged angrily to the surface of French life and refuses to be ignored is the anger of the misleadingly named suburbs. The high-rise public housing blocks of France are known to their remote urban planners who have the sense to live elsewhere as "banlieues" (suburbs). To their unemployed and wretched inhabitants they are known as "cites."

Built in the austerely logical style of the celebrated modernist French architect le Corbusier, they have become the dumping grounds of an alien and unwanted underclass. Few whites remain, except for the hated police and some selfless doctors in run-down clinics with iron bars on the windows.

And yet these grim urban nightmares contain, in demographic terms, the country's future. France has a population of 60 million, of which an estimated 6 million are Muslim, almost all immigrants and their children from Arab North Africa. Then there are the blacks, whose numbers are not counted under that other French myth of La Republique.

It dates back to the revolution of 1789 with its Rights of Man, which asserts that there are no ethnic sub-groups, only citizens, and there can thus be no affirmative action because the myth of La Republique has abolished racism.

"France is not a country like others," intoned the prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, last week. "It will never accept that citizens live separately, with different opportunities and with unequal futures. For more than two centuries, the Republic has found a place for everyone by elevating the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity. We must remain faithful to this promise and to Republican demands."

Whatever the official claim, the best estimates suggest there now more than 2 million blacks in France, mainly from West and Central Africa and the West Indies, and their birthrate is three times as high as that of French whites. So while the brown and black inhabitants of France amount for one-eighth of the total population, they account for close to a third of those under the age of 25. They also account for more than half of the prison population, and close to half of the unemployed.

France's future therefore depends on a sullen and angry and ill-educated underclass of future workers and consumers whose taxes are supposed to finance the welfare state and the pensions of French whites who retire at age 60 after a relaxing 35-hour week at work. After the scenes of racial guerilla war that have disfigured France for the past two weeks, this does not seem to be a promising proposition.

And this problem of France is the problem of Europe on a slightly less urgent scale. The birthrates of Italians, Spaniards, Poles and Germans are similarly low, and the demands of the aging baby-boom generation similarly expensive. Without mass immigration, the promise of the European social system cannot be funded; but with mass immigration, the European social fabric is visibly and violently tearing apart.

And with Jean-Marie Le Pen, the right-wing extremist who leads the Front National winning almost 5 million votes in the last presidential election, France has less room for political maneuver than most.

If the myth of de Villepin's Republique is gently retired, and France tries some of the detested Anglo-Saxon remedies of affirmative action to produce a black and Muslim middle class, and puts black and brown faces onto their TV screens as announcers, into the higher ranks of the police and civil service and armed forces, into the National Assembly and the Senate and the Prefectures and the corporate boardrooms, then it risks strengthening the white backlash that has already given the demagogue Le Pen some 18 per cent of the vote.

So that famous wartime question of Charles De Gaulle in 1944 -- "Brule-t'elle Paris?" (Is Paris burning?), now gets its answer. Yes, Paris is burning with fires of a terrible warning, and the smoke is drifting ominously toward the rest of Europe.

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