NEWS ANALYSIS : ‘Franco-French War’ Over Treaty Leaves Scars : Vote: Nation’s economic disparities, class divisions and city-country inequalities stand starkly revealed.

This is a tale of two countries.

One is urbane, prosperous and at ease in the company of fellow Europeans. It is the France of solidly bourgeois Paris and Lyon; the France of the family vacation villa and the elite lycees. The other is rural or economically depressed and terrified that it will be left out in the new European order. It is the France of the disappearing village and the grimy industrial suburbs.

The two Frances clashed violently in Sunday’s referendum on the Maastricht Treaty for European union, with the urbane, pro-European camp narrowly winning the day. The final tally of the vote for ratification of the treaty was 51% of the French in favor, 49% opposed.

The referendum had huge implications for the European Community and its 40-year drive to construct a unified federal Europe modeled on the United States. A French “no” would have killed the cornerstone treaty, already wounded by a Danish voter rejection in June.

But apart from European considerations, the results of the referendum also revealed deep divisions inside France. The debate leading up to the vote was so bitter it has been called the “Franco-French War.” Seldom before had the economic disparities, class divisions and city-countryside inequalities so clearly revealed themselves in a single vote.

Except for Marseilles and Nice, all of France’s 30 most populated cities voted in support of the referendum. Those two Mediterranean cities, preoccupied with proliferating immigrant populations from North Africa, never have felt comfortable with the idea of a borderless Europe.

Meanwhile, huge swaths of rural France, from Calais in the north to the Pyrenees Mountains in the south, voted angrily against the treaty. On a map, the strip of nay-saying departements cut France neatly in half, running north to south.

The resort-filled mountains voted “yes,” the farming flatlands “no.” Borderlands such as Alsace and the French Basque country, situated perfectly to benefit from trade with their European neighbors Germany and Spain, were in favor. But this only made some other French locales angry. “Sure, Alsace voted ‘yes’ for Maastricht,” snapped one Marseilles resident interviewed on the French TF1 network, “but that’s because they are all half Germans anyway.”

The Franco-French schism was so striking that the newspaper Le Monde divided its post-election analysis into two articles: “The ‘Yes’ Rich and Urban” and “The ‘No’ Rural and Working-Class.”

The France of the “no,” wrote Le Monde columnist Bruno Frappat on Monday, contains “those whom the age has brutalized.” The France of the “yes,” on the other hand, is “urbane . . . a France that has the least to fear of a world opening around it.”

It may be years before the scars of the debate between farmers and free-traders, workers and professionals, economic liberals and French nationalists can be healed.

In some villages such as Laverriere, a fading vestige of the bucolic French ideal only 70 miles north of Paris in the departement of Oise, 80% of the inhabitants voted against the treaty. The countryside is dotted with hundreds of similar flyspeck villages where aging leftovers from four decades of urban migration turned out to vote “no.”

The French rural population has come to distrust anything like the Maastricht Treaty that comes bearing the word change. Indeed, few events in French history have been as dramatic or culturally upsetting as the rapid depopulation of the countryside.

As late as 1954, 27% of the French population earned its living in agriculture. By 1989, the number of working French farmers had dropped to 6% of the population. In a nation where the land is viewed with spiritual reverence, the rural-urban shift of recent decades has radically changed the way of life.

In the Oise departement of north-central France, a territory of green rolling hills threaded by the gently flowing Oise River, the number of working farms has decreased from 6,000 in 1970 to fewer than 3,800 today.

There are clear reasons for the decline. Since the end of World War II, French farms have become increasingly efficient. France is now the second biggest exporter of farm products behind the United States, producing a trade surplus last year of over $9 billion. French farmers enjoy one of the highest per capita farm incomes ($17,000) in the world.

At the same time, however, smaller and less efficient farms have been put out of business. French farmers contend that plans approved by the European Commission to cut agricultural subsidies for their products will drive several hundred thousand more farmers out of business. Fear of additional cuts in subsidies and anger over European Community compromises with the United States in trade talks involving grain exports mobilized thousands of French farmers against the Maastricht Treaty.

In the Oise regional capital of Beauvais, the “no” voters overcame the pro-Maastricht encouragement of Walter Amsallem, the pharmacist who is the Socialist mayor.

Amsallem campaigned hard for ratification of the Maastricht accord. Normally, he said, when he supports an issue he can count on getting about 70% of the town’s 57,000 people to back him, the same percentage that has voted for him in recent mayoral contests.

But when the dust cleared Sunday after the referendum, the ‘no’ voters had carried the city by nearly 52% to 48%.

Amsallem blamed public concern about the economic health of Beauvais’ four main factories for the negative vote. All four, with a total of 4,000 employees, are in the process of “restructuring,” he said.

“This kind of thing has caused a morose feeling in France,” he said, “so people decided to use the referendum as a protest vote.”