In France, systematized revolt

Villepin pushed the proposal through the French parliament with little debate last month, prompting both union and some business leaders to complain that they should have been consulted before the law was written.

The process was itself an example of the country's dysfunctional system for finding consensus on social and economic reform, according to Jacques Julliard, a historian of contemporary French politics.

"Things are done in reverse here," he says. "First a law is passed and only afterwards is it discussed, in the street, chaotically and with a spectacular confrontation."

As the student and union protests over the law mounted over the past six weeks, Mr. Villepin also dug in his heels, saying he would not abandon the new law but was open to discussing changes that might provide better job protection.

A Socialist Party spokesman accused him of holding France "hostage to his presidential ambitions." Cartoonists for the French newspapers have taken to caricaturing him as imperial and imperious. And his chief rival in the center-right coalition government, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, has tried to exploit that image.

"One can be firm," said Mr. Sarkozy in a speech Monday evening that was billed as the start of his presidential campaign, "without being rigid."

But an opinion survey by the Ipsos polling firm and published in the daily newspaper Le Monde, suggested that Villepin's strategy in the face of the demonstrations has paid off in the short term.

Of the 959 people interviewed, 63 percent disapproved of his continued defense of the job plan. But 74 percent of those who identified themselves as supporters of the right-wing UMP, the party of both Villepin and Sarkozy, said they backed his stance.

The opposition Socialists and other smaller left-wing parties, in the meantime, have thrown their support to the student and union demonstrators. Villepin, they said, must abandon the jobs plan completely or the demonstrations would continue.

The threats could be brinkmanship, a sort of "charade" with each side of the conflict taking a maximal position before a compromise, according to Mr. Julliard, who published a book called "Le Malheur Francais," or "The French Tragedy," last year. Or they could presage a serious government crisis.

"There are many people in the street and they are asking for nothing and proposing nothing," Julliard says. "They just want the law withdrawn. Yet at the same time, they expect a solution from the state. They distrust the political class and yet have this extraordinary confidence in the state. It's a particularly French form of immobility."

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