France rejects EU constitution

And pretty strongly too, 55-45. I'm not surprised, because that's what polls said going in, but considering France was a major force behind the constitution, and Chirac was a strong proponant, this is a fairly major set back. Look for the Netherlands to reject it next.

Update: Paul Wells has excellent commentary, pointing out this was a victory for the left and extreme right:

The French people didn't toss up their hands and say, "My God, Conrad Black and Mark Steyn were right, we can't have Eurocrats deciding how wide our toilet-paper rolls should be." More than 90% of Communist and Front National voters rejected the treaty. The most parlable of French opinion-leaders and electors — the ones who understand how profoundly France has been betrayed by its own protectionist, corporatist instincts, and who see an open and functional Europe as the best hope of pressuring France into woefully overdue reforms, as it has begun to do in Germany and as it did to Sweden a decade ago — voted Yes to this constitution.

More: George Will weighs in before the vote. See how on top of things I am?

T.S. Eliot, a better poet than philosopher, wrote: "The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason."

Nonsense. If the French and Dutch reject the constitution, they will do so for myriad reasons, some of them foolish. But whatever the reasons, the result will be salutary because the constitution would accelerate the leeching away of each nation's sovereignty.

Sovereignty is a predicate of self-government. The deeply retrograde constitution would reverse five centuries of struggle to give representative national parliaments control over public finance and governance generally.

Still More:

But so what? Britain's naysayers don't have to reject the constitution for the same reason as France's commies, fascists, racists, eco-nutters, anachronistic unionists, featherbedded farmers, middle-aged "students", Trot professors and welfare queens, bless 'em all. If they want to go down the Eurinal of history clinging to their unaffordable welfare state, their 30-hour work weeks, 10-month work years and seven-year work decades, that's up to them. If Britain doesn't, that should be up to Britain. - Mark Steyn