Franse staatsuitgeverij vernietigt 160.000 exemplaren Europese Grondwet (en)

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - The French government destroyed some 160,000 copies of the EU Constitution at the end of last year, following the discovery that an annotation saying that one of the articles contained "incoherent vocabulary" had inadvertently been printed and published alongside text of the Constitution

"We released the document at the end of November 2004. And two or three weeks later an alert reader saw the note and called us", a spokesperson for the Documentation française, the body in charge of editing the Constitution in France, said.

"So, we called all the places where the Constitution was distributed, in order to warn them and stop any further circulation of the document", she added.

Just 6,000 copies of the erroneous text slipped into ciruclation, as the book was "not a best seller at the time," noted the source.

The original print run had been distributed only in town halls, post offices, and other public places for consultation. But interest in the text has grown in the run up to the French referendum on 29 May.

Nobody knows how the subversive comment got through. Officials believe it is an "annotation someone had put at the first stage of editing, maybe to remember something, and then forgot to erase it". However, the phrase was not visible on computer screens when the disk with the Constitution was used by electronic readers.

A newly edited version of the 232-page text has been doing the rounds since 1 January 2005. The new batch of 150,000 copies cost the government 74,000 Euro.

Several recent polls have shown a rise in the number of French people hostile to the Treaty, and public debates on the text have multiplied as the plebiscite date draws near.

President Jacques Chirac recently announced he would speak on national television (14 April) in order to promote the Constitution.

Meanwhile, many fear that rejection of the Constitution by France, a founding EU member, could plunge the Union into a crisis.