Michel and Vanessa Wilmotte have been together for eight years. They met as students at a Lionel Jospin rally a matter of weeks before the former Socialist prime minister was elected and have campaigned together in every local, regional, national and European election since.
"This is the first time we've quarrelled, I mean really quarrelled, over politics," said Vanessa, who will vote yes on Sunday. "It gets quite nasty, and it's almost every night. Neither of us can make the other understand. I'm abandoning my principles, he says."
France's referendum on the EU constitution is dividing couples and families, splitting work and classmates, and causing upsets in bars and bistros. It is dominating the newspapers, television and the radio. Even the line at the local boulangerie (bakery) has come under its sway.
"The French were tired of politics," said the left-leaning paper Liberation in a recent editorial. "Tired of seeing the same faces, the same names; of trying in vain to detect a difference between right and left. And then the referendum arrived. The debate took off. And France's taste for politics has returned."
Miki, a waitress at a sushi bar near the Opera, said she had witnessed "some real rows, sometimes almost fights. The other day there were four men, business acquaintances I think, at lunch; three yes and a no. Twice we had to ask them to stop shouting, and then the no guy just got up and left, in the middle of his meal."
Le Parisien visited a retirement home outside Paris on Sunday and reported proudly that octogenarian pensioners were exchanging heated insults and throwing each others' copies of the EU constitution in the trash.
"It's perfectly normal that we should discuss this," Jeanne Becquerel, 84, told the paper. "We're French!"
At a small firm of management consultants above the Guardian's Paris office Jacqueline, 38 and a firm yes, said some staff had "definitely changed their habits. People who never used to lunch together now go out every day, others have stopped socializing with each other altogether. You're fed up with the argument, but you can't stop coming back to it."
Most encounters remain more or less civil. At Versailles market last weekend a bevy of matronly center-right Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP) ladies were merrily thrusting yes pamphlets into the hands of passing shoppers just meters from two besuited supporters of Philippe de Villiers's pro-sovereignty Mouvement pour la France, who were politely exhorting a "non."
"It's quite good-natured here," Valerie said. "It is Sunday, after all."
A no campaigner agreed: "We disagree, but it stays within the bounds of the polite. The lowest form of debate is to insult your opponent."
Elsewhere, though, passions have spilled over. A UMP student was spat at on the Place de la Republique one evening last week by half a dozen anti-globalization activists who tore up his tracts and pushed him over. And more than one family occasion, from birthdays to christenings, has been ruined.
"Later in the evening, it all just came out," Noemie, a translator, said of a family dinner to celebrate her brother's 30th birthday.
"People were calling each other terrible names; commies and fascos, traitors and cowards," she said.
But, as one 50-something woman in the boulangerie line on Sunday said: "It feels good to know we can still get excited by politics. Makes me feel quite nostalgic."
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