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Rural alienation runs deep. "They signed this complicated treaty without telling anyone," said Michel Forgeron, a Segonzac grape grower whose calloused hands and weathered face attest to a life outdoors. "Now we don't know where we are going." Until recently, he sold the spirits he distilled from 40 acres to Cognac's family firms. Now multinationals such as Seagram and Guinness have moved in: even Monnet's old company was once sold to Germans and then to Britons. "Decision makers in Toronto or Paris do not care whether we live or die," said Forgeron's wife Francine. "We are pawns on the chessboard."
In a last-minute panic before the referendum, the French government sent copies of Maastricht to all 38 million voters -- a maneuver that may have hurt as much as helped. "The text was incomprehensible," said Guy Bechon, 56, principal of Cognac's Jean Monnet High School. A stocky fellow with a doctorate in physics, he nonetheless voted for the treaty "because I did not want my children to face a future of isolationism. Perhaps we must lose a little of our originality in order to progress." But Bechon would not go so far as Monnet, who hoped that transcending nationalism would "liberate Europe from its past." In making up his mind, Bechon kept mulling over memories that the politicians would have him forget. "In Europe we have a history that lives on in our gut," he said. "As a child, I remember cowering as the Germans goose-stepped by me. Never a day passed that my grandfather did not mention World War I. Today in Sarajevo it seems to be a replay."
In France the Maastricht referendum has unleashed a wave of fear over German domination that has been building ever since unification swelled the size and wealth of its rich neighbor. Britain, roused to resentment by the Bundesbank's indifference to the disruptive effects of the high interest rates, felt it had no choice but to take the pound out of the European monetary system two weeks ago.
But the German issue cuts both ways. Politicians such as former Prime Minister Michel Rocard call Maastricht a way to harness the "German demons." Folding Germany into Western Europe's strong embrace, the argument goes, will prevent it from turning eastward to build a new economic empire around the former Soviet satellites. On the other hand, a growing number of Frenchmen find the intimacy prescribed by Maastricht too close for comfort. "France has been a sovereign nation for 1,000 years," said Cognac Mayor Francis Hardy. "We have suffered too much in three wars with Germany to melt into one federal agglomeration."
Half an hour south of Cognac, Pierre-Remy Houssin, a National Assembly Deputy, welcomed 49 Bavarians last week to "a Musical Encounter" in his village of Baignes. The Germans, from Baignes' sister city of Dietramszell, near Munich, brought three kegs of beer and played brassy tunes, while the French choir chimed in with Mozart and Bach. Houssin told the Germans that he opposes Maastricht. "The best way to fall down stairs is to run up four steps at a time," he joked. But the Bavarians hardly seemed to mind. "Maastricht is a bad program," said Hans Gams, 21, a farmworker. "We are fighting for our existence, given the low prices for milk and meat."