In Donzy, they vote the way the French vote - but which way is that?

Claudie, a sprightly 54-year-old in jeans and a chic black blouse, throws up her hands in disgust.

"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 François run the bar opposite the town hall in Donzy, a pretty town of warm and weather-beaten 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 - in 1988, 1993, 1995, 1997 and 2002 - the townspeople, "les donziais", have voted very close to the way that France as a whole 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-left-right-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 two-round 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. Its sole manufacturing industry is a thriving little factory which used to make feathers for the dancers at the Moulin Rouge and now makes plastic drinking straws for McDonald's.

In other ways, Donzy represents the mood in France perfectly. There is an apparently unvarying and conservative surface, below which many things are shifting or 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 that 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 mainstream politics. But in Donzy, as in France, the two media-anointed ones - Ségolène Royal, 53, on the centre-left and Nicolas Sarkozy, 52, on the centre-right - have failed to fire the public imagination.

There is, once again, a temptation to flee down the cul-de-sacs of the extreme left and the extreme right (although the spell of the xenophobic Jean-Marie Le Pen seems to have faded). The new temptation this year is the cul-de-sac of the consensual centre. François Bayrou, a moderate, pro-European Christian Democrat, discounted two months ago, is surging in the national polls and increasingly on people's lips in Donzy.

Thierry Flandin, 51, an independent centre-right councillor representing Donzy and its surrounding villages, 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. He appears to represent something fresh and provincial, something outside the usual elites of left and right.

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

Coming to a town like Donzy is a reminder that, in terms of quality of life - the "douceur de vivre" (sweetness of life) advertised on the notice in the town hall square - France gets many things right. Donzy is still recognisably a community, and a living social and commercial centre, with a range of shops and eating places you would never find in an English town of comparable size, as well as two doctors' surgeries, a heated indoor swimming pool and a sports centre.

Skim the surface, however, and you find that many of the businesses are struggling to survive, in the face of supermarket competition in larger towns nearby; that much of their trade comes from the weekending Parisians; that one of the doctors has left and no one wants to replace him.

The mayor of Donzy, Bernard Devin, 62, is a Socialist and a retired teacher. How does he read the Donzy crystal ball this year? "People talk at national level about the failure of Mme Royal to break through, to be taken seriously as a stateswoman. That is equally true here. But what is more striking is the absence of any real enthusiasm for Sarkozy. Much could still change but, in my view, we could be heading for a Sarkozy-Bayrou second round, or even a Bayrou-Royal second round."

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.

France's weather-vane

The lowdown on Donzy:

Where is it? 120 miles south of Paris, just east of the Loire, close to the great Pouilly Fumé and Sancerre vineyards.

Population: 1,700; one in three are retired.

Unemployment: 6.5 per cent (national average 9 per cent).

Main employers: A factory which makes drinking straws; a retirement home.

History: Donzy is the only town in France to have the Republican slogan 'Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité' written on the wall of its church.