The French “non” has produced some wonderfully surreal tableaux. It was utterly characteristic of Jacques Chirac’s colossal vanity to show his cadaverous face on television immediately after the result, but only in order to condescend to the mutinous mob in the appropriately named Place Bastille: “It is your sovereign decision, and I take note,” he declared loftily, before promising to fire his wretched prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, whose epitaph will be: “I was only obeying orders.” If Mr. Chirac carries on like this, they will be wheeling out the tumbrels and setting up scaffolds for the guillotine outside the Elysee Palace before long.

Another fine moment was when a disillusioned ex-Chirac supporter declared: “Either ze next president is a proper Gaullist, a souverainiste [believer in national sovereignty], or ‘e will be a flowerpot!” Then there was the petulant response of the European trade commissioner in Brussels, Peter Mandelson, who sounded like a male model who’d just flounced off the Paris catwalk: “Well, really, no one nation has a veto over this European process, you know.” Oh yes they do, Monsieur le Commissaire, and the French have just exercised it.

One more delightful irony: The modern referendum, or plebiscite, is virtually a French patent. The practice used to be known as Bonapartism – not after Napoleon, but after his grandnephew, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, who made himself French president by a coup d’etat in the wake of the 1848 revolution and used plebiscites to rewrite the constitution and have himself crowned Emperor Napoleon III. Bonapartist plebiscites have usually been deployed only when the authorities are sure that the people will give the “right” answer, but on this occasion the emperor turned out to have remarkably few clothes.

It is a kind of postmodern French revolution. Unfortunately it has come too late to save the rest of Europe from the disastrous Franco-German corporatism of the past decade. In their last referendum in 1992, the French came within a whisker of rejecting the Maastricht Treaty, which created the euro and took the decisive step toward the fantasy of a French-led United States of Europe. Now that this delusion of French grandeur has been exposed for the fraud it always was, but in the intervening period the blame for Europe’s economic malaise has been laid on the “Anglo-Saxons.”

Busty French teenage girls promenade in T-shirts bearing the legend: “No to a liberal Europe.” Bizarre though it may seem to anybody who sees Brussels as a profoundly undemocratic, authoritarian bureaucracy, many of the French electorate thought they were voting down a constitution that would impose an Anglo-American economic model and expose Europe even more openly to free trade and global competition. Paris might even become as much of a magnet as New York or London.

If only that were true, many more people in less dirigiste countries – Britain, Ireland, Scandinavia, and Eastern European nations – might support this pernicious document. But the European Constitution, though it pays lip service to freedom, national sovereignty, and democracy, is in reality inimical to all three. If it is also rejected by the Dutch tomorrow, then it is hard to see how the pretense can be maintained that the ancient nation states of Europe are eager to abolish themselves in favor of a kind of Greater Ruritania. Europeans – particularly “new” Europeans – do not care to submit to the blueprint for unenlightened despotism devised for them by Valery Giscard d’Estaing, whose presidency of France (1974-81) is remembered there mainly for his mutually beneficial friendship with the late Emperor Bokassa of the Central African Republic. The French elder statesman shared his imperial majesty’s predilection for diamonds, though Mr. Giscard drew the line at Bokassa’s taste for cannibalism. Such is the caliber of the leader of Europe’s answer to the Philadelphia Convention.

This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the British to seize the initiative in Europe. The kind of Europe that Mrs. Thatcher wanted, in which the French are free to pursue their dirigiste dream, while others can forge ahead with Atlanticist, free market policies – this Europe is now within reach. The problem is that British domestic politics may get in the way.

Tony Blair is the only leader in Europe big enough to change the direction of policy. Having promised to step down by 2009, however, he is running out of time. Mr. Blair never really wanted this constitution, but he went along with it and he has promised a referendum on it next year. Winning that vote now looks even more impossible than before, but if he scraps the referendum without having any alternative he risks looking undemocratic. Yesterday Mr. Blair proposed taking time out for “reflection.” He is biding his time until after the Dutch referendum, but after that he will at least put the referendum on hold, if not abandon it altogether.

If so, he would in effect be declaring the constitution dead. The only way he could get away with such a U-turn is to use his prestige as the recently re-elected leader of the strongest economy in Europe to propose an entirely new, laissez-faire direction for the European Union. He should say that the peoples of Europe have spoken, and the politicians must therefore allow each of them to go its own way.

If Mr. Blair were to dump the constitution now (thereby giving its vision of a federal Europe the coup de grace) and offer a new vision instead, it would up set a lot of the European political class, not to mention his own Labor Party, but it would be a great act of statesmanship. It would also be popular. Plenty of Europeans have been waiting for something better than a Franco-Prussian dirigisme that has hardly moved on since Louis XIV and Frederick the Great. Something more on the lines of John Locke and Adam Smith would be a start.

Is there anything that America can do to hasten the process of restoring Europe to a free-trading bloc of independent nation states? I fear the answer, for the moment, is “Non!” It is hard enough for America to do anything in Europe without being seen to interfere; it’s different if the first move comes from the Europeans.

The best thing the Bush administration can do just now is to sit back and say a silent prayer of thanksgiving as the specter of Europe as a transatlantic rival to the American superpower dies a natural death. Once it is laid to rest, however, it wouldn’t be a bad idea for America to join forces with Britain and other Atlanticist nations to drive a stake through its heart, just to make sure.