THE collapse of President Chirac’s authority will be exposed today when most French people blithely ignore his decision to make Whit Monday a normal working day.

Although the Bank Holiday has been abolished officially, even state employees are refusing to work. Schools, post offices and museums will close for the day and the state railway network will be offering a reduced service.

As if to underline M Chirac’s declining power, his ministers have been unable to impose the reform on their own ministries, which are also stopping work. In the private sector nearly half of French businesses will be on holiday, while the rest will remain open.

Road haulage groups are particularly aggrieved. The Finance Ministry has told them to operate as usual, while the Transport Ministry has implemented Bank Holiday road safety measures, which involve the banning of lorries.

Jean-Michel Thénard, a columnist for the newspaper Libération, said that France was slipping into a “surrealist world” governed by M Chirac’s “absurd poetry”.

“Employees are going to go to work, but they are going to have to find someone to look after the children because the schools are shut, check which trains are running and refrain from posting letters,” he wrote.

The chaos stems from a government decision to levy a 0.3 per cent corporate tax to fund a €2 billion scheme to help the elderly and the disabled.The tax, introduced after the 2003 heatwave that killed almost 15,000 elderly people in France, was to be financed by a Day of Solidarity, an extra seven-hour working day, which the Government decided would be Whit Monday.

But the first Journée de Solidarité last year turned into a fiasco amid a nationwide wave of strikes and protests. Many workers said that they were in favour of solidarity, but not if it meant losing one of their 11 annual Bank Holidays.

Dominique de Villepin, the Prime Minister, tried to calm the revolt by telling employees that they could put in the extra seven hours at any time during the year. In effect, Whit Monday has become an optional Bank Holiday to be negotiated between staff and management in each firm; a situation that even M de Villepin admits will produce “difficulties and perhaps even incoherence”.

He has achieved the remarkable feat of getting French unions to unite with their traditional enemy — the country’s employers — in opposing him.

Laurence Parisot, the chairwoman of the French Employers’ Federation, said: “How can you tell firms to work and then ban road transport?” François Chérèque, leader of the French Democratic Workers’ Federation, said: “There will be strikes in many firms and the strikes are right.”

The chaos is likely to inflict further damage on M Chirac, whose approval rating has plummeted to 17 per cent.

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