President Sarkozy went over the heads of angry union leaders last night to explain to the people his plan to end the archaic ways of France’s Napoleonic civil service and its state-run companies.

Mr Sarkozy invited himself on to the two main television channels as unions were still reeling from a two-day onslaught which they regard as an attempt to destroy the apparatus that employs one in four French workers.

“France is living above its means. If we replace every civil servant who retires, we can’t pay for it,” Mr Sarkozy said. “We have been talking about this for 20 years and nothing was done. Now we’re doing it.”

Railway and power unions called a one-day warning strike for October 18 after Mr Sarkozy’s announcement on Tuesday of steps to scrap retirement privileges that are enjoyed mainly by transport and electricity workers. In a sign that his hard sell may be paying off, usually militant unions at the Paris transport authority decided yesterday not to join the strike.

Sitting in a new ground-floor office in the Elysée Palace, Mr Sarkozy used colloquial language to explain the logic of reforms that he said would enable France to compete in the world economy. “I will not budge on this principle, because it is based on equity,” he said of his plans to align the retirement terms of public sector workers with those of civil servants.

Public opinion is firmly behind plans to scrap privileges that include retirement with high pensions as early as 50. Despite union protests, Mr Sarkozy is confident that transport strikers will not be able to paralyse the country and defeat the Government, as they did in 1995 when it last tried to overhaul their pensions.

After meeting union leaders yesterday, Xavier Bertrand, the Labour Minister, said: “French society in 2007 is nothing like it was in 1995. Everyone is ready to come and debate with me, to have a dialogue.”

Mr Sarkozy, a lawyer by profession, has taken a bigger gamble with his attempt to shrink and modernise a civil service that was created by Napoléon. His measures, which include promotion and pay for performance rather than seniority, were promises in his election campaign last spring.

However, only a third of the public agrees that the civil service should be trimmed, according to polls. Mr Sarkozy wants to cut 100,000 of the service’s five million jobs over five years, by replacing only one in two on retirement.

He wants to do away with statutes that prevent staff moving between ministries, and open up recruitment beyond traditional competitive examinations to take in more minorities. State employees would also be offered payments to leave for the private sector, he has said.

Mr Sarkozy wants fewer jobs for graduates of the National Administration School, where the country’s top mandarins are groomed. Two of the last three presidents and half of the last 10 prime ministers have been graduates of the school.

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