Not too radically, of course. Collobrières, after all, is deep in Provence, a picturesque little place of 1,600 people, with a perfect, tiled village square, commanded by city hall and a café with a table of old men playing cards and drinking pastis, all shaded by huge plane trees from the hot southern sun.

“We lost something with the franc,” said Amrane, the mayor since 2001. “We lost an identity. We moved very quickly into Europe, maybe too quickly.”

Along with mostly visa-free travel, the introduction of the euro in 2002 was heralded as a great step in the building of a united Europe. But printed with images of imaginary bridges and buildings, and with no portraits of anyone, living or dead, euro bills are as faceless as the Eurocrats who run the institutions of the new Europe.

While Europeans value the ease of travel that the euro has encouraged, they also think that the new currency created inflation by allowing merchants to round up costs. And of course the European Central Bank means that countries can no longer adjust their interest rates and exchange rates to suit their particular economic circumstances.

Nathalie Lepeltier, a 39-year-old baker who launched the idea of accepting the old franc, says that “the euro has made life more expensive - prices are much higher.” Whether the euro is at fault or not, people certainly believe that it is.

“People have lost the concept of the value of money with the euro, because of the euro,” Lepeltier said. People remember the price in francs, and they’re shocked now when they use francs at how much more everything costs.”

Amrane’s husband retired and started getting his pension in 2001, before the euro. “He was paid in francs and now in euros, and it’s not at all the same,” she said. “There’s a general malaise.”

The autumn chestnut festival is on the minds of the people here more than political protest. Paris is 860 kilometers, or 535 miles, away, and Brussels even farther.

But the European Union is a source of confusion and annoyance, both abstract and distant. The French were not allowed to vote in a referendum on the complicated Lisbon Treaty to reorganize the workings of the enlarged union of 27 nations. France, like most countries, thought it safer to ratify the treaty in Parliament, where the government holds a majority.

But the Irish voted, and voted no. And there’s a lot of sympathy for them here.