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The New Year sales - required to start on January 7 under France's tough laws on shopping - have begun early for many French people.
In fact, some bargain-hunters began their quest on Christmas Day, when, for the first time in France, a tsunami of unwanted presents hit
the internet auction sites.
"A taboo has been broken," says Pierre Kosciusko-Morizet, boss of eBay rival Price Minister, who estimates that 200,000 gifts were placed on sale on his site on December 25, about 50 per cent more compared with Christmas Day 2007.
"Today, people are far less ashamed selling presents than they were in the past. There's an economic crisis, too, and they want to make ends meet."
The icy wind is blowing not just through France, but across Europe. Lavish consumption has been replaced by belt tightening. Confidence has been substituted by fear of joblessness - for some, even homelessness.
A year ago, champagne sales in Britain scaled new peaks, fuelled by the bonuses of six and seven figures in the City of London. The biggest dilemma for many Germans was whether to fly to Greece at Easter and Mauritius in the summer, or whether to do it the other way round.
Italians, probably the best-dressed nation in the world, splurged on beautiful suits and exquisite shoes and restaurant meals. Newly-rich Spaniards rode the crest of a boom in the housing market.
This horizonless optimism has now been swept away. In just three months, all of Europe's main economies have turned sick, infected by the virus that rampaged through Wall Street and then headed across the Atlantic.
Demand in Europe is now shrinking so fast that economists expect the continent to suffer its biggest one-year contraction of GDP since at least 1992 - and, in Britain's case, possibly since 1946.
Of the 300,000 French people who worked in Britain a year ago, nearly 50,000 have returned home, the daily Le Parisien reported last week.
The mood of the moment is one of making-do, charity work and bitterness at the now-fallen titans of finance.
And there is smugness, too, among those who had predicted that a system built on sub-prime loans, hedge funds and maxed-out credit cards was always doomed to collapse.
In Britain, few people talk of reaching for the bubbly to celebrate the arrival of 2009.
In contrast, the drink that is doing well is home-made beer, a throwback to the country's recession of the 1970s.
Companies that sell kits to brew a beer-like substance in a plastic bin for a tenth of the cost of a pint in the pub say business has surged by as much as 60 per cent since October.
Sales of expensive ready-cooked meals and sandwiches have plunged at Marks & Spencer as people make their dinner at home from raw ingredients. Woolworths is going out of business in Britain, after nearly a century as a national institution. Eight hundred stores will close, with the loss of 27,000 jobs.
In Germany, job security that once bordered on arrogance has been replaced by dread of the dole queue.
"It's easy for someone to go from middle-income wage earner to someone on Hartz IV," said Claudia Hollm, who runs a "soup kitchen" for pets in Berlin, providing meals for dogs and cats of poor pensioners and the jobless.
Hartz IV refers to the welfare payment to the long-term unemployed, which amounts to about 350 Euros ($770) a month.
In Spain, the crash of the construction market has stoked tensions between Spaniards and migrant workers, who for years have been doing jobs that are dirty, dangerous or underpaid.
Around a tenth of the country's population are foreign workers, many of whom entered the country illegally from Morocco, but who are now being accused of taking employment away from natives.
Reflecting an austerity that has not been seen since the oil shock of 1974, many town halls in France have cut back on festive lighting, outdoor skating rinks and sumptuous receptions to welcome the new year.
The well-heeled town of Enghien has axed a 35,000 lakeside bash with champagne and foie-gras, choosing to send the money instead to cancer research.
"We won't be having a New Year's reception," said Mayor Philippe Sueur. "To invite a thousand people, only half of whom are from Enghien, would have been completely out of sync with what people here want."
Across Europe, a common feeling is that things are bad and will get worse and that something profound has happened: the machine of capitalism, lauded as infallible since the fall of the Soviet Union, has broken down in some fundamental way.
At a political level, too, this sense of historic change is apparent. On January 8, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France and former British premier Tony Blair will launch a two-day seminar in Paris, New World, New Capitalism, to mull what went wrong.
The guest list includes German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Pascal Lamy, head of the World Trade Organisation, European Commissioner Neelie Kroes and three winners of the Nobel prize for economics.
