Reality Check

FRANCOIS MORI / AP

HELL YES: Student supporters of the pro-Yes Union for a Popular Movement (UMP).

In the shadow of the last blast furnace in Hayange, a declining French steel town near the border with Luxembourg and Germany, union and communist activists gathered in the local sports hall one recent night to plot their campaign against the proposed European Union constitution. They had put up posters in the windows of the drab stucco building advocating a europe of peace, but — as in thousands of similar meetings throughout France over the past few months — the spirit was more of revolution. For people like Jacques Maréchal, who teaches at a drug-abuse center and organized the meeting, the...

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