The Committee to Protect the Revolution is dominated by leftists, communists, Islamists and Arab nationalists, none of whom has a policy agenda or any experience of management of any description. The irony is that the revolution by unemployed and disorganised, leaderless men in their twenties is now   being offered a political menu in a time-warp.  

She wears a beret. She froths at the mouth about saboteurs. There will be no Eastern Europe modus vivendi with those who ruled. "The revolution is unfinished, we need a purge of all regional, local and political posts to rid us of the RCD," spits Rahyia Nasroui, a vocal lawyer on the Committee and wife of the leader of the newly influential Tunisian Workers Communist Party, which links itself to the ideology of socialist Albania. For her the revolution is about a lot more than an ousting. "We need to rebuild our economy so it is not reliant on the outside world — on something like metallurgy, like farming."

Music from a Berber wedding jangles though an open window. I am talking to Maya Jribi, the secretary general of the Progressive Democratic Party. Claiming 10,000 members, it is one of the weightier pro-democracy, pan-Arabist outfits. It has contributed a minister to the first transitional government. You might expect her to detail a long list of measures to tackle youth unemployment; instead she waves away the question of specifics, telling me that "the programme is coming." Cartoons of murderous Zionist rabbis and Jewish stormtroopers cover the yellow, chipped walls. 

The communists and the PDP are not alone in staking claims to the secular vote. New, yet horrendously anachronistic political figures have emerged. One such figure is the Baathist politician Hassan Kassar. This old Seventies lounge suit, smoking and coughing in a brown hotel lobby, tells me: "Only last night I was watching the best of Saddam Hussein on YouTube and was moved to tears."  

You might expect the leading social democratic party, the Ettajdid movement in its quintessentially Parisian office near the hawkers on the Place de l'Afrique, to take a conciliatory tone towards the West. "Pax Americana began to collapse here in Tunis," says its mechanical general secretary Janayadi Edj Ejawed. "I hope." 

We may see ourselves and our story in the protests in Tunis, but the ageing politicians that hope to ride the wave feel bitter revulsion towards Europe precisely because it appeals — a Europe for which they feel they have remodelled themselves only to be patronised. 

"Tunisians are torn, they want to hate France but the dream they have is to be a Parisian Arab with a restaurant in Belleville. This insults our pride," confesses a friend in a bar-à-zinc straight from a filmset of inter-war Paris.