Black Tuesday Brings France to a Standstill

France's famously organised public service unions brought the country to a halt yesterday, and severely affected travel across the rest of Europe, posing the biggest domestic challenge yet to the year-old rightwing government.

More than a million demonstrators took to the streets in a display of union muscle unseen for years, and those commuters who dared to go to work were forced to jog, bike, scooter, rollerblade or even skateboard into the office.

The burning issue was a tentative and phased adjustment in the national pension plan. By 2020, employees who currently contribute for 37 years would have to pay in for 42 years to earn full retirement rights.

While pension technicalities left those with megaphones at more than 100 protests struggling to produce a catchy battle cry, it soon became clear that, through the scale of the stoppage alone, Black Tuesday had lived up to its name.

Four in five flights were grounded, two-thirds of mainline rail services were cancelled, and the Paris metro was largely shut down. Hardly a bus was to be seen in the capital, Bordeaux or Strasbourg, and transport was paralysed in 15 other cities. The port of Calais was closed for part of the day, and only Eurostar trains ran normally.

Schools were shut, newspaper kiosks were devoid of papers, and the national grid suffered a 10% loss in its electricity supply. Even private sector workers swelled the ranks of the 24-hour protest.

The unions were triumphant and were yesterday already warning of the next one-day stoppage, if the government did not back down.

"We have secured a turnout not seen for many years," said Bernard Thibault of the CGT union, whose ranks filled the centre of Paris for more than four hours.

The minister responsible for the reform, François Fillon, started the day talking tough: "The government will not halt in its path [to reform the pension system]."

But, by the end, he declared he was "ready to listen" to the views of the unions and said that he "respected" the size of the demonstrations.

If Mr Fillon appeared to blink first, it was because every minister remembers the fate of Alain Juppé's conservative government which fell in 1997, two years after crippling transport strikes kicked a previous attempt at pension reform into touch.

Even before the stoppage began, Mr Fillon was reported to have privately sounded out union leaders for possible concessions. He is to meet them again today, this time on an official basis. Employers took a dim view of proceedings. The head of France's employers' federation Medef, Ernest-Antoine Seillière, said that workers were impoverishing themselves by taking to the streets so often.

"We are going to see the consequences of these days when France does not work, in the unemployment figures, in the growth rate which becomes weaker and weaker, and in public deficits," he said.

The issue of pension benefits swirled around other parts of Europe yesterday. In Austria, 100,000 school teachers staged a one-day strike, affecting up to one million students.

Back in Paris, beside a banner which read "Teacher looks for rich woman for his retirement", Alain Brignaud, from the city's suburbs, said: "This is like the time in Britain when Thatcher arrived and started to roll back the public sector and succeeded. We don't have a choice. We have to protect the system as it is."

Mr Brignaud thought that public opinion was about to swing behind the protesters, although he acknowledged that most of his pupils and younger workers felt unmoved by the issue.

The two other sentinels of the workforce, employees at the car firms Renault and Peugeot Citroen, who were urged by the unions to join the strike, reported only patchy stoppages yesterday.

As many of Paris's commuters began their journey home, opinion was divided.

"It hurts, but one has to tell this government where to get off," said one besuited rollerblader, slithering off uncertainly into a stream of scooters and cyclists.