On the surface the vote was about the Maastricht treaty: in reality it was a battle between modernisers and traditionalists, between those who welcomed the late 20th-century world, including Maastricht, and those who feared it. But all indications are that a large majority of the French - more than two-thirds in one survey - do not want Jacques Chirac or Edouard Balladur to succeed Franois Mitterrand. Despite Lionel Jospin's unexpectedly strong showing in the first round of voting yesterday, the Gaullists still look like winning the decisive second round of the presidential poll next month. For these are times well-suited to the clear-headed distinctions underlying the libertarian socialism of John Stuart Mill.The author is reader in modern history at Cambridge University and Fellow of King's College.. France is in the process of electing a president it does not really want.

Given the apparent success of the Conservative appeal to "Victorian values" in the Eighties, Labour in the 1990s should reclaim its own Victorian ancestry. The question was not so much of democratising authority as of placing it in the right hands. Against the greed and ignorance of Mammon, Labour thinkers such as Sidney and Beatrice Webb or RH Tawney could pit the disinterested authority of the doctor, the teacher, the civil servant or later the scientist. Not the least of the unspoken expectations underlying Clause IV was a deference to professional and educated authority that has now largely disappeared.Such a conception was one of the casualties of the Sixties. Since then, libertarianism and anti-authoritarianism have been the most potent sources of mobilisation across the political spectrum. Hostility towards European officialdom, ridicule of the monarchy and support for voucher-based choices in education flow from this new political mood no less than feminism, child-rights and environmental campaigns.

In the current debate, therefore, members of the Labour Party should not merely weigh the electoral disadvantages of an unreal commitment to a massively extended state sector. They should also consider whether the bulk of their supporters desires the corporatist and paternalist social order implied in the existing constitution. The early 20th-century Fabian vision of collectivism still assumed a Victorian ethic of public service within a society in which hierarchical practices and assumptions remained strong. As AJP Taylor once wrote of the British working class during this period, they followed their leaders into the General Strike of 1926 with the same unquestioning loyalty that they had followed their officers out from the trenches in 1914. The halting and stagnant record of socialist economies from the Seventies and increasing awareness of the terrible human and economic costs of the earlier exercises in planning have destroyed this part of the case for Clause IV.Scarcely less important has been the substantial shift in attitudes towards authority since 1918.