With doom all around, many French left-wing sympathisers are looking to an unlikely saviour: a Paris postman who is trying to lead a new French revolution.

Olivier Besancenot, a disciple of Leon Trotsky who delivers mail in the posh suburb of Neuilly, is only 34. In other lands he would be dismissed as an oddity but in France, with its love of insurrection, Mr Besancenot is a star. His army of supporters believe that his time has come.

“We are at the end of a cycle. We are at a turning point in the course of the world economy,” Mr Besancenot said as he surveyed the “crisis of capitalism” that was forecast by Karl Marx.

The baby-faced Mr Besancenot hardly looked the political heavyweight as he chatted with The Times in his office over the printing plant of the Communist Revolutionary League (LCR) in Montreuil, a working-class suburb.

With his cheek and eloquence, “the red postman” has become a serious player, a left-wing populist who needles the established parties from factory floors and TV chat shows. He won 1.6 million votes as the LCR candidate in last year's presidential election; he enjoys a 56 per cent approval rating - far ahead of Nicolas Sarkozy - and a recent survey ranked him the second most effective opponent of the President. On Thursday Le Monde newspaper gave him half a page to pronounce on the crisis.

The timing could not be better for the schoolteacher's son to launch France's New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA). He has been anointed leader by the factions of the far Left except the fading Communist Party. Support is flowing in from the young and traditional leftists turned off by the Socialists' embrace of the free market and attracted by the romance of revolt. “If the Socialists have discredited themselves, it's not my fault. Holding power drove them crazy,” he said.

France glimpsed the darker side of Mr Besancenot when a judge revoked the parole of Jean-Marc Rouillan, a leader of Action Directe, a revolutionary group in the 1980s, who was serving life for murder. Rouillan broke the terms of his release by giving an interview in which he backed Mr Besancenot and showed no remorse for the 1986 killing of the chairman of the Renault company. Mr Besancenot has refused to disown Rouillan.

Mr Besancenot's party may be aiming for the barricades but it is starting with candidates for the European Parliament elections in June. He is a fan of Che Guevara but his ideal is the Paris Commune of 1871, a short-lived exercise in people power that ended with thousands dead at the hands of government troops.

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