Eighteen months ago Julie Coudry was the star of the Paris barricades as she stirred a national student revolt that defeated President Chirac’s attempts to reform the labour law.

Yesterday Ms Coudry, 28, leader of the national Student Confederation, was on the other side, resisting an uprising against President Sarkozy by radicals who have shut down more than a third of France’s 85 universities this week.

“Students have understood that you don’t have to invade universities with steel bars in order to be understood,” Ms Coudry told The Times as she prepared to meet Valérie Pécresse, the Higher Education Minister. “There are other ways of getting your voice heard than with violence.”

Ms Coudry, an economics student at the Sorbonne, was called in by the Minister as part of a Government attempt to quell an uprising that has caught Mr Sarkozy off guard just as he has faced strikes by public transport workers.

The national rail and Paris transport strikes enter a third day today but they are slowly winding down after a compromise with the Government that opens the way to negotiations on phasing out retirement privileges.

The prospect of the students and rail strikers forming a common “AntiSarko” front appears to be fading but trouble in the neglected and underperforming universities has a habit of exploding out of control.

There have been ugly incidents this week, including fights with riot police at Rennes and Nanterre, west of Paris, but the main feature of the mutiny is a conflict among students. This pits radicals, who want to restage the 1968 student revolt and “overthrow the Sarkozy regime”, against a moderate majority that opposes their cause.

At Rennes protesters refused to accept a majority student vote to call off the blockade of the university. “What happened in Rennes is especially shocking,” said Ms Coudry, who has worked her way through university as a barmaid and was also employed by the CFDT, one of the two big left-wing trade unions.

Ms Coudry founded her confederation four years ago after breaking away from UNEF, the main student union, which she accused of focusing on old ideological warfare rather than the practical needs of students.

The Sarkozy team is banking on the realism of the current student leaders to oppose the radicals. As Ms Pécresse was meeting Ms Coudry and other moderate leaders yesterday, the rebels called for all-out “struggle” to force the Government to abandon a reform law, passed last August. The hard-liners dismiss May’s presidential election as a fraud in which the “evil” Sarko hoodwinked “the masses”.

“We must continue to mobilise, to strike, to blockade and above all to establish a show of power against the government,” said Kamel Tafer, spokesman for the “Coordination”, the organisation that links militant “assemblies” in the universities.

Aurélien Picot, student spokesman for SUD, the most radical French trade union, told The Times that the reform law “creates universities focused on financial interests, whose goal is no longer to create and share knowledge.” The militants are harnessing deep unhappiness over the wretched state of the universities, which are the dumping ground for students who cannot make the grade to the Grandes Écoles, the colleges for the brightest 20 per cent. The universities, open to anyone who passes the secondary school Baccalauréat, suffer from a 40 per cent drop-out rate.

The mutiny has exasperated university chiefs because the so-called Pécresse law last July was a compromise, approved by everyone, aimed at allowing the universities to govern themselves and seek some private funding.

“Unlike the [2007] revolt, the majority of researchers and teaching staff are hostile to blockades and do not support the strikes,” the universities presidents’ association said. Seven of the eight heads of Paris universities also appealed to students this week to halt opposition that was being mounted by people “who want to block the advance of higher education . . . showing that they are ignorant of the real functioning of the universities”.

Ms Coudry and other moderates remain opposed to Mr Sarkozy on many fronts. They are fighting for funds to accompany the new law and measures to steer students towards jobs.

Ms Pécresse appealed last night to the students to call off their mutiny. “Blockading a university for a few days or weeks means that a whole academic year for a student is in danger.”

To the barricades . . .

- So concerned was the French Government about the 1968 Paris student riots that tanks were deployed on the outskirts of the city for fear of revolution. Cobble stones were pulled up to be used as missiles, and barricades were erected as 10 million people joined the student protesters

- The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 were probably the greatest threat to China’s Communist government since the 1949 revolution. Demonstrators occupied the square for seven days, demanding democratic reforms, before their movement was brutally crushed by the army

- When in July 1999 a student protest against the closure of an Iranian newspaper was violently broken up by militant groups, thousands of students took to the streets of Tehran to protest. Chanting “Either Islam and the law, or another revolution” they forced the Government to sack the police chiefs allegedly responsible Source: Times archive

Read Charles Bremner’s blog on the strikes

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