Read Charles Bremner's blog on the strike

Millions of commuters struggled through a national rail stoppage yesterday as the French travel network slowed almost to a standstill and tens of thousands of strikers marched through Paris.

The strikers intend to disrupt transport services for a second day today, but hopes for an imminent end to the dispute rose after union leaders and President Sarkozy’s Government opened the door to compromise.

The walkout by SNCF railway workers and staff of the RATP, the Paris transport authority, was in protest at the threatened loss of retirement privileges.

The stoppages did not affect the new higher-speed Eurostar rail link with London, which opened yesterday, but they played havoc with transport to and from Paris airports.

The all-out transport strike is opposed by between 65 and 70 per cent of the public, polls show, and yesterday the CGT – the biggest union – blinked just as state sector workers were starting their trial of strength against Mr Sarkozy. Bernard Thibault, the CGT chief, told the Government that he would accept talks on ending early retirement with each of the state enterprises involved.

Mr Sarkozy’s team agreed for the first time that the State should take part in negotiations. “The President thinks there is a chance for the spirit of responsibility to find a way out of the conflict,” Mr Sarkozy’s spokesman, David Martinon, said.

Although Mr Sarkozy and François Fillon, his Prime Minister, have been talking tough, they had been expected to accept a compromise, providing that it did not appear to jeopardise the principle that all workers must contribute to pension schemes for 40 years before retirement.

Half a million workers in transport, power, the Merchant Navy and state theatres, enjoy the right to retire after 37 years and 6 months’ work.

“Things are moving,” Mr Fillon said, after a session with Mr Sarkozy, as about 20,000 public sector workers and students marched through the Left Bank from the Montparnasse to the Austerlitz station.

Even left-wing media argued that the unions must compromise rather than resort to an old-fashioned street fight with the Government. “One only has to listen to the heads of state enterprises to understand that there is genuine scope for negotiation,” said Libération, the left-wing daily. “All this could end up not in pointless arm-wrestling but in a real improvement in social relations.”

A sense of relief was heard from union leaders who fear becoming bogged down in a prolonged strike. “If even the CGT seems ready to negotiate, let’s not waste any time. Let’s negotiate,” Jacques Voisin, head of the moderate CFTC union, said.

The strikers did not heed a call from François Hollande, leader of the opposition Socialist Party, to return to work today – and there remains a danger that militant workers might not go back even if a deal is reached with the Government. Leaders of SUD and Force Ouvrière, the most radical unions, are insisting that workers stay out until Mr Sarkozy abandons the pension reform entirely.

The radicals are hoping to foment a broader revolt by joining cause with students who have paralysed 35 out of 80 universities with sit-ins. Militant students want Mr Sarkozy to abolish a university reform passed last summer, but they have limited support. At the Sorbonne, in Paris, students disrupted classes yesterday. “I find it abominable and above all absurd,” said Laurent Susini, an angry professor, as he tried unsuccessfully to pass pickets.

While much of France wants the strikes over and done with, the Trotskyite and far-left militants of the trade and student unions see the industrial dispute as perhaps their last big chance to replay the student-worker revolt of 1968. The radical SUD rail union boasted last night of a triumph for the “workers over the bosses” and vowed to continue the “struggle” to the bitter end.

One student leader, quoted by Le Monde newspaper last night, called on protesters to block traffic on the Boulevard Périphérique, to help the “struggle to put an end to capitalism”.

The college revolt has prompted strong opposition from what appears to be a majority of students who do not want their studies disrupted. At Nanterre University, where the May 1968 revolt started, antiprotest students shouted “Allez les Bleus” – the football supporters’ encouragement – as riot police charged students who were picketing the entrance to their lecture rooms.

The protesters jeered at CRS riot police a chant of the 1968 protesters: “Come back Pétain, you left your dogs behind.” Philippe Pétain was head of state during the collaboration with France’s wartime Nazi occupiers.

Resisting reform

—In November 1995 the newly elected Prime Minister Alain Juppé and President Chirac attempted to implement welfare reforms to cut France’s social security deficit

—The move provoked an angry reaction from transport unions, which were quickly joined by workers in the postal service, education, utilities and students

—After 24 days of stoppages, most public sector employees returned to work when Mr Juppé agreed to shelve pension reforms and drop a plan to overhaul the railway system

Sources: French Ministry of Employment; Times archives

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