It’s 1939 Again on a Wary Continent--All the Talk Is of War : Crisis mood: Parisian movie lines, cafes and living rooms turn into debating circles.

Conversation Monday at a Paris cafe on the eve of the war deadline with Iraq:

“So what do you think--is it war?” asked a man drinking a petit creme at the bar of Le Mansart, only a block from the Seine on the Left Bank.

“Yes, it’s war for sure,” said Gilles Rouillard, the cafe owner.

“Of course it’s war,” interjected Patrick Part, the young waiter. “When you are dealing with a fool like Saddam Hussein, what else can you do? War is the only thing a fool like him can understand.”

The grease-smudged head of a dishwasher repairman popped up from under the counter and turned toward the waiter.

“Do you know anything about war?” asked the repairman. “Have you ever been in one?”

“No,” answered the waiter, sounding a little less bellicose than before. “Have you?”

“Yes,” said the repairman, “I spent 21 months in the mud in Vietnam and Algeria. If you had been in the stinking mud with me, you wouldn’t be so tough”--he paused for effect--” mon general. “

“It’s been like this all day,” complained Sophie, the cafe owner’s wife. “Everybody is talking about war, and when they are not talking about war, it’s Lithuania.”

Seldom have times been more animated and intense in the streets of Paris and other European cities than they were Monday. A year after the euphoria that marked the end of the Cold War, Europe finds itself on the eve of a probable war with Iraq and the dawn of a scary, unpredictable future in the Soviet Union.

The last time the Continent faced such a war deadline was Sept. 3-4, 1939, when Britain and then France issued separate ultimatums to Adolf Hitler to withdraw his troops from Poland or face a declaration of war. The result, of course, was World War II.

On Monday, street corners, cafes, movie lines and living rooms all turned into debating circles as Parisians struggled to come to terms with the somber events.

A cartoon by the artist Plantu, on the front page of Monday afternoon’s Le Monde newspaper, showed a confused peace dove hovering over a landscape populated by troubled souls, all asking for help.

At the Bistro Saint-Honore, a small restaurant near the Opera Garnier, an itinerant Moroccan carpet salesman, Maraqhi Said, 43, stopped for a minute to rest his feet and talk with the owner and his wife.

“Nobody’s been buying carpets for weeks,” he complained. “This war has got everyone in a bad mood.”

At the Cathedral of Notre Dame, the 13th-Century church on the Ile de la Cite at the center of Paris, Roman Catholic Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, archbishop of Paris, called for Parisians to gather in prayer against the “law of blood caused by the desire for power.”

Unlike many other church leaders, Lustiger is something of a hawk on the possible war with Iraq.

“There is no such thing as peace without justice,” said the prelate, “but there is also no such thing as a lasting peace at the price of an injustice.” But the cardinal was also quick to note what he considers the hypocrisy of the French government, which was quick to condemn the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait but slow to react to the Soviet crackdown in Lithuania.

“How can you defend the rights of Kuwait and deny those of Lithuania?” he asked.

The latest opinion poll, released Monday in Le Monde, showed 70% of the French people in favor of President Francois Mitterrand’s policy on the gulf. France has 10,000 troops in the region, including three desert-tested Foreign Legion regiments. After several weeks of speculation about France’s commitment to a gulf war, on Jan. 9 Mitterrand announced that the country was ready to fight if Hussein did not withdraw.

Despite the consensus of support for Mitterrand, the prospect of war has divided families, sometimes along male-female lines. In Sunday’s Journal du Dimanche newspaper, the political cartoonist Wolinski portrayed the following argument between a husband and wife that could just as easily have taken place in the United States:

He: “There are some just wars.”

She: “So you are ready to die for oil, are you?”

He: “The whole thing could be over in 48 hours.”

She: “It could take longer than you think, and there will be thousands killed.”

He: “You prefer to wait until there are millions of dead people, after Iraq has the bomb?”

She: “Making war to avoid war is stupid.”

He: “It is better to have a good war than a bad peace.”

She: “It is better to have a bad peace than a bad war.”

(Trembling, the husband and wife fall into each other’s arms and embrace on the sofa.)

She: “Do you think we ought to stock up on sugar?”

He: “Not really, but buy a 10-pound bag just in case.”

Apparently many people in Paris had the same idea.

Said Jean-Jacques Perroud, 33, deputy director of the grocery section of the Left Bank department store Le Bon Marche: “We have been surprised to see a clear increase in demand for sugar, coffee, pasta, rice and oil since this morning. We are asking the warehouses to deliver twice as much as we normally get.”