"Change? All the candidates say that they will bring change, but what are they going to change? We need more security. We need more justice. We need jobs. We need a better standard of living for those who work and less money for those who do nothing.

"Will this election change anything? I tell you, I can never remember an election in which people are so undecided, so confused, so unimpressed with all the candidates."

Claudie and her husband Fran�ois run the bar opposite the town hall in Donzy, a pretty town of warm and weatherbeaten stones, just east of the great bend in the river Loire.

France has hundreds of small towns, but none quite like Donzy. In the last five national elections the townspeople, "les donziais", have voted very close to the way that France has voted.

Donzy is France's weathervane; its conscience, its crystal ball, its "Peoria" - the town which shifts its politics with the same skittish, right-leftright-left pattern as the nation.

All those impatient changes seem to have brought no change. And yet "change" - the need for it, the fear of it - is the great issue in the 22 April - 6 May presidential election.

I put it to Claudie and the customers at her bar that the French electorate talks constantly of its desire for "change" but is terrified of anything much changing and blocks most changes. "Yes, you're right, " says Claudie.

"Yes, I suppose that's true, " says Jacques (71) a retired carpenter. "But what we need is not a Madame Royal but a Madame Thatcher. We need a leader who will force us to change, even when we scream."

In important ways, Donzy is not France. It has no immigrants, no problem suburbs, low unemployment, little crime.

In other ways, Donzy represents the mood in France perfectly. There is an apparently conservative surface, below which many things are not quite as they appear. There is a constant complaint that politicians do not address the real issues - crime, high taxation, education, health, pensions - but an admission that there is little popular willingness to accept the sacrifices which true reform might bring.

This was supposed to be the election in which attractive, newish, youthful (for France) candidates of both centre-right and centre-left cut through this thicket of contradictions and renewed popular faith in politics. But in Donzy, as in France, the two media-anointed ones - S�golene Royal (53) on the centre-left and Nicolas Sarkozy (52) on the centreright - have failed to fire the public imagination.

The new temptation this year is the cul-de-sac of the consensual centre. Fran�ois Bayrou, a moderate, proEuropean, Christian Democrat, discounted two months ago, is increasingly on people's lips in Donzy. Thierry Flandin (51) an independent centre-right councillor representing Donzy and its surrounding towns, is a thoughtful man, a farmer and a student of politics. "Bayrou is definitely on the rise, " he said. "People are talking about him more and more.

He is a decent man, but my fear is that he is a mirage, a self-deception by the voters.

"In reality, I fear, he has no power base and is incapable of shifting France forward. He is just another way of avoiding change."

France instinctively knows, Flandin says, that some sort of Big Bang is needed to reduce the public sector, push the country forward and kickstart its economy. At the same time, there is a profound fear of any change which might destroy "many of the things which make us French".

In other words, seven weeks before the first round of the election, Donzy's crystal ball is cloudy and confused. Donzy, as ever, mirrors France perfectly.