Paris offered yesterday to give Colombian guerrillas safe haven if they released hostages including Ingrid Betancourt, the former presidential candidate.

President Sarkozy’s Government, which has been working to extract Ms Betancourt from her six-year captivity, made the offer after the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) said that it would release three hostages, including Clara Rojas, Ms Betancourt’s aide. Mr Sarkozy said that he hoped that the Farc announcement would lead to the release of all hostages.

Ms Betancourt’s plight has mobilised an intense French campaign. Rallies were held around the country yesterday as media and politicians joined a “day of support”. This month, after evidence emerged that Ms Betancourt was still alive, Mr Sarkozy appealed directly to Farc leaders to let her return home for Christmas.

Ms Rojas would be freed with her three-year-old son, whom she bore in captivity after a reported relationship with a guerrilla, according to the terms of the offer. Consuelo González, a former congresswoman kidnapped in 2001, would be the third to be released after a mediation attempt by President Chávez of Venezuela.

The Farc is trying to negotiate the exchange of 46 hostages, including three US defence contractors, for 500 of its prisoners in Colombian jails. François Fillon, the French Prime Minister, said yesterday that the request to give asylum to freed rebels after a potential prisoner exchange came from Álvaro Uribe, the Colombian President. “France has said it would be willing, along with other European and Latin American countries, to do that,” Mr Fillon said.

The Farc told a Cuban news agency that it had given the order to release the three hostages to Mr Chávez or “whoever he decides to designate”. The Venezuelan President had been negotiating an exchange until the Colombian President ended his mediation effort last month, accusing him of backing the rebels. Mr Chávez, who visited Mr Sarkozy in Paris last month, accused his Colombian counterpart of being a “pawn of the empire”.

On Monday night Mr Chávez called the move by the Farc “a nice Christmas present” for the families of the hostages. “Starting today we have begun to see how we can receive these two ladies and the child,” he said.

Ms Betancourt, who has French citizenship from a former marriage to a diplomat, is a heroine in France, the subject of books and hero worship in intellectual circles. News bulletins on state radio remind the country at least once a week that she is in captivity.

Mr Sarkozy is widely supposed to be seeking to extract Ms Betancourt in an act comparable with his deal to release Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor from prison in Libya in July and his flight last month to Chad to bring home journalists and the Spanish flight crew involved in an imbroglio over child abduction by a humanitarian group.

Ms Betancourt was seen in a video seized by Colombian security forces three weeks ago staring mutely at the ground in a jungle hideout.

French emotion was fired further by the publication of a letter to Yolanda Pulecio, her mother. In it, the distraught Ms Betancourt said that the hostages were “living like the dead”. “I no longer have the same strength, it is very difficult for me to continue believing,” she wrote. “I am not well physically. ”

France’s offer of haven for the guerrillas would appear to conflict with President Sarkozy’s determination to break with his country’s past indulgence towards political lawbreakers. France stirred anger in Europe in the 1970s and 1980s when it gave asylum to terrorists belonging to the Italian Red Brigades and the Basque separatist group Eta.

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