Ever since their awesome revolution in 1789, the French periodically have erupted in rage against their governing elites and signaled historic turning points in the process. But behind the latest eruption of rage is an even deeper fault-line in France and Europe between liberal democratic forces and neo-fascists. No matter who wins in the current French confrontation, those faultlines are bound to widen with the working classes ominously tilting ever more towards the fascists. PNS editor Franz Schurmann, a professor emeritus of history and sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, writes on foreign politics. His internet email address is <fschurmann@pacificnews.org>.

Once again, as they have many times since their 1789 revolution, France's enraged citizens have risen against their governing elites. All too often such eruptions have signaled a major turning point for France, Europe and even the world.

Whatever the outcome of the current struggle between the right-of-center Juppe government and the leftwing unions, Europe is going to be churned up by the fault-lines French rage is opening up. The most menacing will pit not the center against the left but liberal democrats against nationalist ultra-right/fascists.

The surface issue is public employee entitlements but the deeper cause is exclusion, a French word one encounters over and over in French media. To understand why this word arouses such rage among the French, one must recall that their awesome revolution represented a grand act of inclusion for ordinary people. Long regarded as scum by their elegant elites, in 1789 they won admission into the body politic as "citizens" and have never forgotten.

Exclusion is the act of being invited out. Deep down the French -- even those who will benefit most -- know that Juppe's reforms violate their sacred revolutionary tradition of inclusion. Polls show that 62 percent of the population support the strikers and only 30 percent oppose them.

If economic issues like wages, benefits and pensions alone were the issue the unions would have simply applied tactics the French call "gnawing away" to get their way. But the neo-conservative government, under great pressure from powerful Germany, felt it had to take a principled stand for radical reform. Its great mistake was not remembering the hard-won dignity of France's white working class at a time it feels inundated by non-white immigrants.

At stake for the Juppe government is France's own inclusion in the European Union whose planners see a stable Euro-currency as the life force that will eventually hold it together. Thus the Germans gave Juppe an ultimatum -- either strengthen your franc through deficit reducing reforms or there will be no Euro-currency and thus no EU. And without an EU, there will be no new political order as envisioned by the liberal democratic ideology that has been sweeping Europe ever since the fall of the Soviet Union.

France's elites are aware of the yawning class differences growing in France but they also know their options are limited. They failed in Bosnia, their francophone African empire is coming apart, fundamentalist Islam is spreading in their former dependency Algeria. Within France, unemployment is now at 11 percent and the country's competitive position vis-a-vis Germany is plummeting.

But if desperation drove Juppe and his boss President Chirac to launch the reforms and also re-join NATO after almost 30 years of haughty absence, desperation also drove the Communist-led General Confederation of Labor (CGT) and the AFL-CIO supported Workers Force (Force Ouvriere) to ride French rage towards a classic general strike. The fear that gnaws at the bellies of the leaders of these unions is that the left is losing the working class to the ultra-right.

"The extreme right is on the verge of conquering the working class," the left-wing monthly Le Monde Diplomatique reported in a December article entitled "People's Despair and Politicians' Demogogy." The most remarkable fact about last May's presidential election, the author writes, "is the electoral breakthrough by the National Front among blue and white-collar workers." In that election half of those who voted for the fascistic anti-immigrant Front were workers; in 1988 less than a third were.

France, like the U.S. and Germany, is getting an information economy where computer-wise yuppies are becoming the new privileged class. They will number around a third of the population while another third will be formed by immigrants doing the dirty work at rock-bottom wages. In the middle will be a class of little shops, little farms, little incomes. Helped along by exclusion, the proud old French industrial working class is doomed to disappear.

The leftwing unions are promising these newly excluded they can force the government to rescind the exclusion. But the National Front is offering them a different inclusion within the white French nation while permanently excluding the aliens -- an inclusion not unlike that promised Germans by the National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazis) in the 1930s.

Whether the leftwing unions win and the EU fails to materialize, or vice versa, Europe's economic crises are bound to get worse. When that happens West Europe's ordinary citizens will probably do what Russians are now doing under similar circumstances: some will vote "red" for neo-communists while others vote "brown" for neo-fascists. And as in Russia the losers will be liberal democrats.

"Far rightwing parties determined to take power legally are gaining roots within working classes destabilized by unemployment and the dismantling of social protections," writes Dutch analyst Rinke van den Bink. "This is a new and disturbing phenomenon, especially in France."